An Annotated Bibliography of H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure

If you're already reading this blog (and to judge by the number of comments so far, there are not many of you out there who are), you probably already know who H. Rider Haggard is, and may even have read what is arguably his most famous novel, She: A History of Adventure.  For that reason, I don't really want to give an introduction to this book, which is already widely known and regarded as a classic of early Fantasy literature and the Lost Race sub-genre.  Of course, if you haven't read it, I recommend that you do so immediately.  It's a wonderfully poetic, almost hallucinatory work of literary strangeness.

There are at least two annotated critical editions of She.  The best known and most cited is Norman Etherington's (1991); also available is Andrew Stauffer's (2006).  Recently, as part of my graduate program in Comparative Literature, I completed an annotated bibliography of She.  Since the terms of the assignment dictated that I limit myself to only thirty sources, this was really more like a partial bibliography.  And, although it obviously can't hold a candle to the two aforementioned critical editions, I've decided to include it here.  The bibliography addresses the cultural influences and ideas that Haggard used to create his masterpiece (alternative religious practices, archaeology, etc.).


In the following bibliography, I have attempted to provide some background for H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure from more than one standpoint, but primarily from that which stems from the concept of survivals which Sir Edward Tylor promulgated in his anthropological work. This concept was also elucidated by Haggard’s close friend, the folklorist Andrew Lang, who provided Haggard with invaluable assistance in the preparation of his manuscripts. Although the theory of survivals has fallen into disrepute because of its association with racism (unfortunately deserved), for Haggard and his colleagues and readers, it was a source not only of fascination but of fulfillment. It is my contention that Haggard, for deeply personal reasons, felt drawn to certain interrelated cultural currents of his day, and that these currents, or clusters of ideas and cultural productions accordingly shaped his artistic output. Most especially, Haggard identified with a strain of modern culture that is often identified as “anti-modern”: that is, Haggard, like many others in Victorian and fin-de-siecle England, to judge by the success of his novels, failed to find a valid sense of significance in modern life, and therefore looked to the past to find it. As Wendy Katz, in her study of Haggard, remarked, Haggard’s characters, not the least of whom was Ayesha, were really mouthpieces for his own ideas. Haggard’s characters made their way to lost cities of Bronze Age (or even more “primitive”) cultures because that was precisely what Haggard and his audience wished that they could do – and tried to do, in various symbolic ways.

In looking back through those windows into Victorian cultural life that newspaper articles of the era provides, I was continually struck by how little had changed between then and now. The divisions, contentions, and preoccupations of those times – a not very distant past when one really considers it - are still very much alive today. As my research progressed it became easy to see why She remains a popular book, and has never gone out of print. In fact, the use of fantasy literature as a salve for the alienation of modern life is now more ubiquitous than ever; involvement in alternative religious practices and the holding of non-conformist beliefs, the industry of New Age doctrines based on imaginative readings of Egypt’s Pharaonic ruins and other archaeological sites, are practices that are more entrenched in the English-speaking world than ever.

It should be cautioned, however, that Haggard was not entirely consistent in his doctrines. He never obtained the kind of education that his friends Andrew Lang and E.A. Wallis Budge succeeded in obtaining, and it is unlikely that he conceived of his most cherished ideas in a truly systematic way. As time goes on, scholarly criticism of Haggard has elaborated to an ever increasing degree upon the kinds of ambivalent and contradictory discourses that one can find in his work. In his life, Haggard greatly admired Zulu culture, and yet he was at the same time a political conservative and fought on the side of the British in the Anglo-Zulu Wars. He endured an unhappy marriage with a woman whom he believed was a model of respectability, simultaneously maintaining a close secret (but unconsummated) relationship with another woman whom he regarded as an intellectual equal. These kinds of contradictions manifest themselves in his work as well: and as yet there is no critical consensus as to whether Ayesha constitutes a neurotic and fear-driven fantasy of female agency, or something much more sublime. Accordingly, compiling a bibliography of She presented certain challenges with regard to coherence. At times I felt a great frustration that I could not make it more comprehensive. In addition to what I have already mentioned with regard to survivals, I have striven to emphasize that not only was Haggard’s work responsive to issues in his society, but that it came out of and perpetuated established literary traditions in a very deliberate manner. Although Haggard claimed (for publicity, I believe) that he wrote She in a hurried, almost automatic fashion, ample documentation exists to refute this claim. The finesse with which he executes the symbolic correspondences in the novel, moreover, cannot be overlooked. Haggard scholars now understand that Haggard skillfully and seemingly seamlessly amalgamated ideas, plots, characters, and even verbatim from other literary works. In short, Haggard was an artist; and it seems that at last the world of scholarly criticism has grasped that fact. My hope is that this
bibliography reflects that.



Authoritative Text

Haggard, Henry Rider. The Annotated She: A Critical Edition of H. Rider Haggard’s Victorian Romance. Ed. Norman Etherington. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Print. Visions Series.

Norman Etherington’s (Professor of History, University of Western Australia) annotated edition of H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure is not the only annotated edition of Haggard’s seminal work available, but is probably the most cited in other works of scholarly literature on Haggard. Etherington’s work is especially valuable because its editorial process serves to dispel the notion that She was composed in a manner similar to that of automatic writing. Etherington edited the manuscript, the Graphic Magazine serialization, and two subsequent print editions. This editorial process makes it possible to document the many alterations that the text underwent before it reached publication. In particular, the manuscript contained conservative political allusions to events current in Haggard’s day. At his friend Andrew Lang’s behest, Haggard deleted these portions prior to the serialization in The Graphic. Haggard also received assistance from scholars to make the potsherd text historically and linguistically accurate.



I. The Origins of She in the Life of the Author:

1. Cohen, Morton. Rider Haggard: His Life and Works. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1961. 29-62. Print.

Morton Cohen’s (Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York) solid and well-researched biography of H. Rider Haggard is not the only one of its kind, but is the most widely cited in current scholarly studies of Haggard. The second chapter, “Africa and Marriage”, describes the period of Haggard’s life between 1875 and 1882, during which he worked for the British colonial government in South Africa. The chapter describes Haggard’s admiration and interest in Zulu culture, his surprising adaptation to life outdoors, and his involvement in the Boer Wars. The chapter also relates how Haggard ultimately had a falling out with his employer, Lord Shepstone, the upshot of which – his departure from his job and from Africa – was a major disappointment to him. This chapter is important for scholars of Haggard’s romances since it provides a basis for understanding Haggard’s personal investment in writing romances set in African locations.


2. Haggard, H. Rider. The Days of My Life: an Autobiography. Ed. C.J. Longman. London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926. ebooks.adelaide.edu. Chapter III: “Natal” (no pages available). 13 December 2011. Web.

Haggard’s posthumously published autobiography is quite naturally an invaluable resource for understanding his life and work. This is particularly true regarding those life experiences which relate to his ongoing interests in archaeology, ethnology, and spirituality. The third chapter, “Natal,” recalls the period of Haggard’s life as a colonial functionary in South Africa. In this chapter Haggard describes Zulu culture in respectful, even admiring terms. Although he cautioned that not all Zulu “witch-doctors” were honest in their profession, Haggard nevertheless felt compelled to profess a belief in the veracity of their claims to genuine spiritual and divinatory powers. Other aspects of Zulu culture, such as their ceremonies, musical traditions, bravery and general moral character receive Haggard’s praise. These passages shed an interesting light on Haggard’s thought and attitudes towards the colonized cultures and their members, and are accordingly of value to scholars analyzing Haggard’s work in a context of post-colonial studies.


3. Haggard, Henry Rider. The Days of My Life: an Autobiography. Ed. C.J. Longman. London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926. ebooks.adelaide.edu. Chapter XI: “Egypt” (no pages available). 13 December 2011. Web.

In the eleventh chapter of Haggard’s autobiography, he describes his trip to Egypt, his interest in Egyptology, and his thoughts on reincarnation (he would like to have believe in it, but found that it was not “susceptible to proof”). Also of importance is that it is here that Haggard notes his dislike of modern life (he cannot even bear to read about the Georgian period), and his sympathy for “savages” and for practitioners of pagan religions in days gone by – “I venerate Isis, and always feel inclined to bow to the moon!” Haggard also discusses here his friendship with Andrew Lang, and his ambivalence with being a writer. Again, Haggard’s autobiographical accounts shed important light on his life and thought: they reveal that his career as a writer of romances stemmed, at least in part, from his personal spiritual experiences and ideas.


4. Higgins, D.S. Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller. Amazon Digital Services: Kindle Edition, 2011. Chapter I: “The Formative Years.” Electronic (Kindle) Format.

D.S. Higgins’ (no current academic affiliation) biography of Haggard was originally published by Littlehampton Book Services (West Sussex, UK) in print format in 1981. Although Higgins has taught literature at the university level and has published in academic journals, this work by intention is more of a popular biography than a scholarly one. Nevertheless, it is not without merit, and has been cited in scholarly critiques of Haggard’s work. This is because Higgins was the first writer to have access to Haggard’s private diaries, so that his information is accordingly reliable. In “The Formative Years”, Higgins describes the abuse Haggard received at the hands of his male family members and peers, and how his close relationship subsequently influenced his relationships with women in general. Haggard’s pattern of relationships with women are of interest to scholars because of the scholarly debate over whether Ayesha was a product of misogyny or not.


II. Who were the Zulu of the Transvaal?:

5. Chidester, David. “Dreaming in the Contact Zone: Zulu Dreams, Visions and Religion in Nineteenth Century South Africa.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 76.1 (2008): 27-53. Web. Oxford Journals. 13 December 2011.

David Chidester’s (Professor of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town) article discusses the role of dreams and divination in Zulu society as the latter came into military conflict with the British colonial authorities. Relying heavily, but far from exclusively, on the missionary Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the Amazulu (1870) for authentic information regarding the Zulu practices of dream divination, Chidester concludes that the Zulu practice of reading dreams as texts performed an urgent need in the sustenance of relationships with ancestral spirits in the face of economic and political disintegration brought on by violent colonial contact. For the Haggard scholar, this recent article serves to place Haggard’s admiration of Zulu spiritual culture in a certain context. Because Zulu diviners were responsive to external events and contingencies in their interpretations, as Chidester proves, it becomes clear how the efficacy of their powers would have impressed a sympathetic onlooker like Haggard, even if he perceived it (as he no doubt did) as a “survival”.


6. “Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe.” The Leeds Mercury. 11486 (no volume given) 2 February 1875: no page given. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

This article in a British newspaper describes the difficult plight of a Transvaal chief and his tribe in the wake of the Zulu Wars. The article strives to elicit the readers’ sympathy for them, portraying them as victims of the ferocity of the Zulus. The article notes that it is the duty of the British government to ensure that those under its rule are treated justly, and laments that Langalibalele and his people failed to receive adequate protection. The article does not otherwise stint in its praise of the colonial government’s humanitarian qualities. This article is noteworthy for the same reasons as the previously cited one. It is of interest to Haggard scholars, inasmuch as it makes clear that Haggard went against the grain of colonial and public opinion with regard to his high estimation of the Zulus, who were generally cast as villains in official colonial narratives.


7. Adogame, Afe. “Zulu.” Encyclopedia of African Religion, Vol. 2 Ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage PublicationsInc. (2009) 744-745. Web. Gale Cengage Learning. 15 December 2011.

This is an introductory article to the traditional Zulu religion by a Senior Lecturer in World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh. It includes an overview of mythology, the importance of divinatory specialists, and a description of the Zulu concept of isithunzi: the isithunzi, distinct from the vital force which keeps the human organism alive (umoya/umphefumelo), survives after death and continues its existence as an ancestral spirit, often playing an important role in the affairs of the living.


8. “The Zulu War.” John Bull 3040 (no volume given) 15 March 1879: 164. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

This is a journalist account in a London newspaper of the Zulu War which was fought while Haggard lived in Natal. The periodical John Bull was characterized by a patriotic tone in its reporting. The British soldiers are portrayed as undergoing severe hardship and scarcely able to defend themselves. The Zulu warriors, led by Chief Secocoeni (whom Haggard met and greatly admired), are reported to be the aggressors. The article concludes with a tally of those fallen in battle. The article is of importance to Haggard studies inasmuch as it is a reflection of the public’s interest in the affairs of South Africa, and the relations (in this case, not amicable) between the colonial authorities and the indigenous inhabitants.


III. Esoteric Pastimes: Cultural Survivals, Spirits of the Bygone Ages, and Other Exotic Trends of Haggard’s Time:

9. Budge, E.A. Wallis. The Dwellers on the Nile, or, Chapters on the Life, Literature, History and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. London: The Religious Tract Society, 1885. www.archive.org. 156-166. Web. 13 December 2011.

The famed British Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge was a personal friend of Haggard’s, so it almost goes without saying that his work influenced Haggard to a significant degree. In Chapter IX of this work, one of Budge’s earliest Egyptological works, Budge discusses the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification. Mummies, reincarnation and soul theory were aspects of Egyptian culture that held a particular fascination with the British public at that time. She, moreover, contains a great deal of mummy imagery, which has not
failed to elicit scholarly critical comment. Like Haggard with regard to the Zulus, Budge displayed a respect for his subject which was unfashionable at the time: while the majority of scholars posited a European origin of Egyptian culture (following Flinders Petrie), Budge correctly posited an indigenous African origin for the Egyptian religion. Budge’s work has continued to be popular with practitioners of alternative religions, much as has Haggard’s.


10. Cotterill, H.B. “The Ancient Ophir – Interesting Discovery in South Africa.” The Leeds Mercury 11783 (no volume given) 15 January 1876: no page given. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

Cotterill was a noted literary scholar in his day. This article is an early one on the Mashonaland (Rhodesia) ruins which would become known as Great Zimbabwe. The article advances the notion that the ruins were the remains of the Ophir, the fabled source of the Biblical Solomon’s gold. One of the edifices is likened in structure to Solomon’s temple, and Cotterill surmises that the former must have been modeled on the latter. Haggard found this site to be particularly intriguing, and it is an obvious source for King Solomon’s Mines and the lost city of Kor in She.


11. “Fashionable Egyptology.” Funny Folks 505 (no volume given) 2 August 1884: 242. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

This is a brief blurb from a light-hearted British periodical described as “a comic companion to the newspapers.” It describes a London society party with an Egyptological theme – that is, faux-Egyptian décor was used and the guest came dressed in Pharaonic drag. This article is of interest because it documents the preoccupation with Egyptology in British popular culture of Haggard’s time.


12. Lang, Andrew. Custom and Myth. London: Longmans, Green and Co.: 1884. http://www.gutenberg.org/. Chapter I: “The Method of Folklore”. (no pages given). Web. 13 December 2011.

Lang was the most prominent British scholar of folkloric studies in his day. His compilations of fairy tales are still read by children today. Lang was also a close personal friend of Haggard’s: he assisted in editing She, among other books of Haggard’s, and the two even collaborated on a novel together at one point (The World’s Desire). The first chapter of Custom and Myth, “The Method of Folklore,” outlines Lang’s thesis, developed from Tylor’s theory of survivals, that mythological tales represent survivals of earlier, more irrational periods of human history. The remainder of the book develops this thesis, and a later chapter treats Hottentot mythology (the Hottentots were an indigenous people of South Africa). Although the theory of survivals has now been superseded, Lang credited – to some degree, at least - the members of “savage” cultures for a complexity of thought, as demonstrated by their mythology.


13. “Lieutenant Cameron’s Journey Across Africa.” Illustrated London News 1916 (no volume given) 15 April 1876: 367. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

The Illustrated London News printed stories primarily of cultural or human interest, and, as its name indicates, accompanied by copious illustrations. This article details an exploratory expedition taken by a gentleman of leisure. In a manner typical of explorer narratives of the time, the article recounts the adversities of nature that Cameron overcomes. More importantly, it describes the exotic customs of the “natives”, including those of their “medicine men.” Dire scenes of slavery are also described, including the abuse of the captives at the hands of a “half-caste” slaver. It should be noted that half-caste slavers are a cliché feature of Lost Race Romances (often, as in this article, of mixed-Portuguese descent); the term “half-caste” is always used pejoratively in adventure fiction of the time. This article demonstrates how popular prejudices can generate remarkable confluences of life and art - assuming, of course, that neither Lt. Cameron nor the anonymous author of the article embroidered their accounts.


14. Tylor, Sir Edward. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. 3rd Edition. London: John Murray 1920: books.google.com. 70-159. Web. 13 December 2011.

Tylor was the most noted anthropologist of his time. Primitive Culture, originally published in 1884, established the long-held (but now superseded) theory of survivals, in which the customs, language and religious practices of “primitive” peoples are posited as survivals of an earlier stage of human history. The other half of this theory was that “civilized” cultures (Western culture, in particular) had evolved to a higher state of rationality – due mostly to an innate mental superiority, as evidenced by what are now understood to be pseudo-scientific interpretations of craniometric measurements. Chapters III and IV (in reality a two-part chapter) are called “Survival in Culture,” and it is here that this idea of survivals is fully outlined. Although Haggard did not know Tylor personally, Tylor’s work was of such enormous influence that it is impossible that its ideas were not at play in Haggard’s work. Unlike Tylor, however, Haggard did not necessarily view “survivals”, such as he would have observed in Africa, in a pejorative sense.


15. Wagner, Rudolph. “Creation of Man, and the Substance of the Mind.” The Anthropological Review. Issue II (no volume given) London: 1 August 1863. 227-233. Gale Cencage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

In this lecture, Wagner discusses the races of man and whether the presence of the soul can be scientifically determined. The editor of the article (unknown) indicates in a footnote to the title that he has excised those portions of the lecture which touch on the connection of “the Science of Man with Historical Christianity and Revelation.” An unfortunate case of censorship indeed! Wagner cites a certain Blumenbach, whose work has led him to conclude that the races are fundamentally the same. Wagner concurs with this, although he states that the Indo-European type comes closest to the ideal. Wagner also cites the current debate between the “materialists” of science, and those, like himself, who are more spiritually inclined. This article was already more than twenty years old by the time She was published, and by that time the ascendancy of the “materialists” was even more complete. However, this article is an excellent example of the cultural trend of Victorian Londoners to commingle scientific and spiritual concepts into a single mélange – such as Haggard, via Ayesha and other creations, was wont to do. The article is also of note, in that the author refutes (if not completely) certain racist assumptions of the time. He rebuts those who claim miscegenation results in degeneration, and slyly comments that the idea of there being five Adams and five Paradises (i.e., for the five races) is of great benefit for slaveholders.


IV. "I shall come again and once more be beautiful ...": Spirits of the Dead in Victorian London:

16. “Lecture on Spiritualism.” Nottinghamshire Guardian 1008 (no volume given) 19 May 1865: 3. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.


This brief article recounts from a neighborhood London newspaper narrates the substance of a lecture given on Spiritualism by one of its advocates. The lecturer, J.H. Powell, editor of a periodical known as Spiritual Times, was a well-known figure in the Spiritualist milieu. In his lecture, Powell made a case for the compatibility of Spiritualism with Christianity – a common debate regarding Spiritualism at that time. The author of the article reports that Powell successfully rebutted audience members who asserted that Spiritual practices were a manifestation of insanity or moral evil. This article is of interest because of the influence of Haggard’s Spiritualist practices on his writing, including She. The article documents the prominence of Spiritualism – and the contentions surrounding it – in London society of the Victorian period.




17. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 2004. 17-50. Print.

Alex Owen‟s (Professor of History and Gender Studies, Northwestern University) scholarly study of Occultism in late 19th-century England is a pioneer work for no other reason than the fact that there continues to be a scarcity of scholarly studies in this aspect of fin-de-siecle culture. Fortunately, Owen‟s study is excellently researched and organized, making it of great value for the scholar interest in the social and intellectual milieu in which Haggard wrote She. In the first chapter, “Culture and Occult at the Fin-de-Siecle,” Owen traces the origins and development of Spiritualism and Theosophy, their impact on British religious thought, and the subsequent proliferation of Occultist organizations and a concomitant development of symbolic Scriptural reading in “mainstream” Anglican communities. She additionally notes that an important feature of Occultist subculture is an abhorrence of contemporary materialism. Owen concludes that Occultist and Spiritualist doctrines and literature were based on a belief in an ongoing transmission of ancient wisdom, which could be accessed in religious texts of bygone ages. She also makes a passing reference to She, whose success she attributes to “a Victorian fondness for archaic origins, secret societies, and the Gothic.”


18. Wallace, Alfred Russell. Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. 3rd Edition. London: George Redway 1896: 71-81. www.archive.org. Web. 13 December 2011.


Wallace is best known as the man who, along with Charles Darwin, established the theory of Evolution. Unlike Darwin, he incurred derision from members of the scientific establishment for his unorthodox religious ideas, and he took part in the Spiritualist practices of Victorian London. This Spiritualist work, first published in 1874, attempts to establish a scientific basis for Spiritualist practices, with which Haggard was actively involved at various times in his life (later in his life he became a member of the Society for Psychical Research). Chapter III attempts, in particular, to establish the reality of apparitions as a scientific fact. I will not here venture an opinion as to Wallace’s success in this endeavor. There is no doubt, however, that Wallace’s cant, or at least the commonly held occult concept that gave rise to it, influenced Haggard’s characterization of Ayesha, who wields tremendous power based on a “scientific” form of magic – or magical form of science, depending on one’s perspective.


V. Ayesha’s Gender Politics: Is She Really New?:

19. “Education of Women.” The Englishwoman’s Review. Issue VIII (no volume given) London: 1 October 1871. 257-263. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

This article addresses social attitudes toward women in education. It lauds a periodical known as The Examiner for recommending that young girls pursue coed education in order to avail themselves to the higher quality of boys’ educational facilities. It lambastes The Saturday Review for decrying female emancipation as the road to barbarism before going on to point out that there is no substance to the claim that women seeking careers in “male” professions have an agenda to destroy the family. To judge by the tone of the article and the title of the periodical featuring it, the latter is probably aimed at a socially progressive audience. The article is valuable with regard to She for documenting both the contested social position of women in British society, as well as the ongoing trajectory of increasing emancipation of women that characterized that period.


20. “The Higher Education of Women.” The Shield. Issue 19 (no volume given) 4 June 1870. 153-154. Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 13 December 2011.

Both the article and the periodical in which it is found are in this case intriguing. The Shield was the weekly circular of the Anti-Contagious Diseases Act Association, an organization devoted to the repeal of the aforesaid Act. This law was considered to be excessively onerous to women, compelling them, among other things, to undergo forced medical examination for sexually-transmitted diseases if they were seen by plainclothes policeman outside their homes after dark. The sexual nature of the law made it difficult for propriety-minded women to speak out against it. Nevertheless, that is what two women did: and so the Association was formed. More conservative commentators accused the protesters (not all of whom were women by any mean) of moral and sexual depravity. As history shows, the law was eventually repealed. This article is supportive of higher education for women, from a very Christian perspective. The granting of rights to women, such as education, was posited as a route to improved moral development. This article is valuable to scholars of She in a similar manner to the article that precedes it; it also demonstrates the great extent to which social debates of the time were conceived in terms of religion.


21. Watts, Ruth. “Scientific Women: Their Contribution to Culture in England in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Women, Education and Agency, 1600-2000. Ed. Jean Spence, Sarah Jane Aiston, and Maureen M. Meikle. New York, Routledge Taylor & Francis: 2010. 49-65. Print.

Ruth Watts’ (Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Birmingham) article narrates the histories of three scientific women who lived prior to the 20th-century. Jane Marcet (1770-1858), Mary Somerville (1780-1872), and Margaret Bryan (ca.1760-ca.1820), all managed to subvert the paradigm of science being a man’s only profession. Although they were never permitted to enter any scientific societies, their work was influential, particularly in the realm of scientific education. Watts also describes the process of “negotiating constructions of femininity” that the three women undertook. She concludes that Marcet, being the most apologetic, had internalized female inferiority to the greatest degree, while neither Somerville, who moved in radically progressive social circles, or Bryan were as inclined to offer explanations for what was at that time an unusual lifestyle for a woman. This article is valuable in that it demonstrates that well before the publication of She, the barriers between women and a scientific career were slowly but surely crumbling. Inasmuch as Ayesha is a scientist (of a sort), Marcet, Somerville and Bryan are her precursors.



VI. Two critical reactions to She:

22. Moore, Augustus. “Rider Haggard and ‘The New School of Romance’”. Rev. of She: A History of Adventure, by H. Rider Haggard. Time, a Monthly Miscellany. Issue and Volume not known. London: May 1887. 513-524. Andrew Stauffer. Introduction. She: A History of Adventure. By H. Rider Haggard. Ed. Andrew Stauffer. Calgary, Broadview Press: 2008. xiv. Print.

This is a citation of a review of She in the introduction to Andrew Stauffer’s (Professor of English, University of Virginia) annotated edition. It is an unusual review of the work in that it is negative. Moore describes it has "crammed with tawdry sentiment and bad English.” This is typical of what the minority negative reviews had to say of Haggard and She – that is, its melodrama and low style were seen as detracting from its overall quality.  This perception of Haggard‟s work – that it is “popular” or “low” in style in and content – has contributed to the tardiness with which it has been taken seriously as a literary production in the scholarly world.

23. “Review of She: A History of Adventure.” The Queen: the Lady’s Magazine and Chronicle. Issue and Volume Unknown. London: 15 January 1887. Pages unknown. en.wikipedia.org. Web. 13 December 2011.

At present I can locate no better source for this contemporary review of She. However, I have included it because it is a positive review of the work ("this is a tale in the hands of a writer not so able as Mr. Haggard might easily have become absurd; but he has treated it with so much vividness and picturesque power as to invest it with unflagging interest, and given to the mystery a port of philosophic possibility that makes us quite willing to submit to the illusion.”) in a periodical aimed at women. The Queen was a woman’s magazine intended primarily for upper class women of leisure. If this review has been preserved on microform or
in a digital archive, as certainly seems possible, it would serve as documentation that a female audience for the novel existed.



VII. Survivals Past and Future: Ayesha’s Precursors and Her Legacy:

24. Mardrus, J.C. and E.P Mathers, ed. and trans. “The City of Brass.” The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, Vol. 2. London, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group: 1991. 287-306. Print.

Critical studies on the history of Science-fiction and Fantasy have already identified a number of tales in The Thousand and One Nights as antecedent to the two modern genres, including “The City of Brass.” Haggard’s love of the tales is well documented as well. The plot of “The City of Brass” is very similar to Haggard’s Lost Race romances, and can be considered a precursor to the genre. In this tale, a Damascene caliph travels to a remote corner of West Africa where he discovers a lost city of brass. There is no lost race living there, but the perfectly preserved, and ravishingly beautiful, corpse of the queen continues to reside in her palace. The parallels between this and the imagery of She are obvious, and it is likely that the tale was a source of inspiration for Haggard’s novels.


25. Salmonsen, Jessica. “Lost Race Guide ” (or “Lost Race Checklist”). Violet Books. N.p. n.d. Web. 28 November 2011. http://www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check-guide.html

“The Lost Race Guide” (or “Checklist”) is part of a larger website called Violet Books. The owner of the site is a writer of young-adult fiction and bookseller (now retired) named Jessica Amanda Salmonsen, who lives in Bremerton, Washington. To date, this is the most comprehensive bibliography of Lost Race fiction available in any format. It does not include Lost Race storylines found in comic books. If the list has any other drawback, it is that the annotations are sometimes inaccurate: there are a number of instances in which Salmonsen’s plot description does not match what is found in the book. Presumably this is because Salmonsen did not read all of the works she was cataloguing. Nevertheless, her bibliography, considering the obscurity of the subject, is an impressive achievement. The Violet Books website also includes a brief history of Lost Race fiction, and a short essay on H. Rider Haggard.


26. Vinson, Steve. “They-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed: Arsake, Rhadopis, and Tabubue; Ihweret and Charikleia.” Comparative Literature Studies (2008): 45.3. 289-315. Web. 10 December 2011.

In this ground-breaking article, Steve Vinson (Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Language and Literature, Indiana University) demonstrates that Haggard derived imagery and plot elements of She from two prose works from the ancient world. These are the tale known as “First Setne,” a Egyptian work composed in Demotic during the Ptolemaic period, and Heliodorus of Emessa’s prose romance Aithiopika, a Greek-language work, most likely written in Syria. Painstakingly drawing parallels between the three texts, Vinson makes a convincing argument that Ayesha is a composite of characters drawn from both works. He further identifies She’s strange hot-potting scene as being derived from a scene in “First Setne” in which the protagonist does penance by placing a brazier on his head. Vinson’s is one of the first scholarly studies of She to locate its place within a longstanding literary tradition. His work does much to dispel the notion that She was written hurriedly and without forethought, as well as establishing its literary pedigree.


VIII. New Directions:  Some Recent Critical Responses:
27. Gold, Barri. “Embracing the Corpse: Discursive Recycling in H. Rider Haggard’s She.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 38.3 (1995): 305-327. Web. Project Muse. 28 November 2011.


Barri Gold’s (Professor of English, Muhlenberg College, formerly of the University of Chicago) article analyzes the corpse-imagery central to the plot of She. While she finds that Haggard’s novel in general reinforces colonialist assumptions, Gold also deploys a complex hermeneutic to uncover counter-narratives within the main framework of the story. These counter-narratives are associated with “birth, corpses, and waste.” More specifically, symbolic clusters of imagery pertaining to these three themes address an otherwise unstated anxiety around the colonial narrative – an anxiety that other narratives which would
undermine it exist. Gold describes her findings as “counter-intuitive”, perhaps because they address potentially uncomfortable topics (i.e., the possibility that Holly and has a sexual relationship with his ward). However, the conclusions of this article are well-developed and plausible; moreover, they accord with the findings of other scholars – namely, that Haggard’s work in general conveys a nuanced and ambivalent relationship with colonialist discourses. As Neil Hultgren noted in his survey of Haggard scholarship, this was a groundbreaking article in Haggard criticism, signally new directions to come. Although Gold’s work looked back to earlier feminist criticism of Haggard, inasmuch as she finds that the work is “at best ambivalent about women, at worst virulently misogynistic,” her perceptive and complex hermeneutical method is innovative, and has galvanized Haggard studies.


28. Katz, Wendy. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 1987. 30-57. Print.

Wendy Katz’ (Professor of English, Saint Mary’s University in Halifax) study of Haggard’s work represents the old guard of Haggard criticism. That is, Katz’ work is solidly post-colonial in its outlook. In the second chapter, “The Politics of Romance,” Katz acknowledges that romances (i.e., what we would now call Fantasy literature) fulfilled a need, articulated by Haggard, for escape from a world that had become increasingly dominated by machines and work routines. However, Katz finds that Haggard exploits this in order to laden his narratives with unsavory political propaganda (a charge which, as Etherington’s work has shown, is not entirely untrue by any means). Katz concludes that in Haggard’s work, the romance form serves both to promote and to whitewash colonialist brutality. His aesthetic, in which realist characterization is sacrifices in order to depict the heroic, she regards as “indefensible.” Katz’ work is cogent, and a valuable component in the overall picture of Haggard criticism: time has shown, however, that she will not have the last word.


29. Malley, Shawn. “’Time Hath No Power Against Identity’: Historical Continuity and Archaeological Adventure in H. Rider Haggard’s She.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 40.3 (1997): 275-297. Web. Project Muse. 13 December 2011.

Shawn Malley’s (Professor of English, Bishop’s University) article deals explicitly with the issue of survivals in She. Malley first traces the historic and intellectual trends (Tylor, and most especially Haggard’s friendship with Lang) which underlay Haggard’s interest in survivals, Malley then analyzes the text of She to uncover structural recurrences which reinforce its themes of reincarnation and the persistence of identity across the chasms of time and space. This persistence in identity, in turn, serves to bolster colonialist claims to Western cultural patrimony in the seminal civilizations of the ancient Near East. In this schema, Ayesha, a white queen ruling over the dark-skinned Amahagger, can be identified with both colonialist and the “Other” at the same time. Although in some way’s Malley’s work looks back to the post-colonial Haggard scholarship of the 1980s, it is more typical of the new directions of “post-post-colonial” scholarship, in that it relies on a closely analytical textual hermeneutic, and takes into account the layered discourses present in She’s narrative structure.


30. Monsman, Gerald. H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: Political and Literary Contexts of his African Romances. Greensboro NC, ELT Press (2006): 191-224.  Print

Gerald Monsman (Professor of English, University of Arizona) is at the forefront of new Haggard scholarship. Aside from annotating King Solomon’s Mines, he has also produced this influential study of Haggard’s work. In general, Monsman’s work concurs with other recent Haggard scholars that the structure of the Lost Race romance was less about imposing European civilization on the colonized than it was about the former discovering a pristine sense of self in the former. In Chapter Seven of Monsman’s book, “Romances of the Lakes Region: Tales of Terror and the Occult,” Monsman unpacks the character of Ayesha not as a figure of terror or power per se, but as a multilayered symbol both of Circean seduction and reconciliation, and as a fallen soul who has been entrapped in carnality. In the case of the latter stratum of significance, Monsman finds an idealism based on Plato’s Phaedrus; and he cites a little known quote of Haggard which the latter made in response to a reader’s query about Ayesha in Pall Mall Magazine. She, in this schema becomes a tale of the soul’s redemption. Monsman, like other Haggard scholars of the newer school, sees both colonialist and anti-colonialist discourses at work in Haggard’s romances, and notes the writer’s mixed allegiances. But he concludes that “pale, homesick Victorians … must bring their lives into contact with the dark and passionate myths of Africa’s body, engendering new symbols for their lost primordial identity.”

Lost Race Romances: Where to find them

As alluded to in previous posts, the titles by H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Abraham Merritt can be easily found in most bookstores and libraries.  They are an excellent introduction to the genre.  However, if you wish to delve a little deeper, some more effort is required.  First of all, one should bookmark Jessica Amanda Salmonsen's Lost Race Checklist on her Violet Books website: as stated in a previous post, this is the comprehensive listing of Lost Race titles (http://www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check-guide.html).  Kessinger Publications has reprinted many Lost Race titles in sturdy and easily recognizable (if unattractive) paperbook form (http://www.kessinger.net/); Arno Press likewise had a Lost Race and Adult Fantasy series of reprints in the 1970s (no website is available for Arno - I'm not sure if it's still in operation).  Otherwise, in order to obtain a desired title, it's going to be necessary to buy a used copy on-line.  There are a few places where one can do that.

The obvious places to start are amazon.com and ebay.  However, if you can't find what you're looking for there, you can also use biblio.com (www.biblio.com/) - my personal favorite which I highly recommend.  There is also the excellent L.W. Currey, Inc. (http://www.lwcurrey.com/ - look under "Themes and Subgenres"), www.tomfolio.com/, http://www.thompsonrarebooks.com/, http://www.ilab.org/ - to name just a few options.  If you're willing to print entire novels from your computer, you can use www.books.google.com/, http://www.archive.org/index.php, www.gutenberg.net/.  This list of sources is by no means exhaustive, and if you simply Google the title you're looking for, you can usually find all the options for buying or downloading that are out there.

Also, do not forget about using interlibrary loan.  If you are daunted at the prospect of shelling out 50+ dollars for a book whose quality you don't know, you may want to ask your local library to order it for you (many titles are available only on microfilm - if, like me, you are a true zealot, you can print them out two pages at a time and then have them bound at a local copy shop).  Additionally, some of the descriptions in Violet Books' Lost Race Checklist can be misleading or poorly informed, so you might also want to research (if possible) a title before purchasing it.  A good example of this is the blurb for Louise Gerard's The Golden Centipede: "African romance with hidden city & prehistoric survival with Ayesha-like White Queen".  That sounds pretty cool, so naturally I bought the book when I found a twenty dollar copy on amazon - but in reality, it was only a tedious jungle-crime adventure which climaxed in the ruins of a Zimbabwe-like ancient city with a dragon/dinosaur statue. 

So - happy shopping!  If anyone reads this and has a particular Lost Race romance that they read and would like to recommend, please do so.

The Lost Race Romance: What and Why? (And Why Not Anymore?)

The Lost Race Romance is a genre of popular fiction that began flourishing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and continued vigorously through the 1920s.  In the '30s the genre began to decline, and after the second World War it became all but extinct.  The premise of the Lost Race romance entails members of a first-world nation (usually Britain, the United States, or Australia) traveling to a remote and uncharted area of the world and discovering an ancient culture that by virtue of its isolation has remained more or less unchanged for millenia.  The most popular cultures of antiquity to be used by writers of the genre were Incas, Egyptians, Atlanteans, Romans, Vikings, and Israelites: but there are also examples of Crusaders, Himyarites, Aztecs, Greeks, Lemurians, Phoenicians, and even Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal peoples.  A number of individuals writing in this genre became considerably popular: the novels H. Rider Haggard (She, King Solomon's Mines), Edgar Rice Burroughs (many of the Tarzan titles), and Abraham Merritt (The Dwellers in the Mirage, The Moon Pool) have never gone out of print.  Others have been reprinted (finally!) in more recent times in response to an interest in the history of fantastic literature (Arno Press' Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Series and Kessinger Publications both have extensive catalogs of more obscure titles).

Related to, and often overlapping, the Lost Race genre is the Lost World genre.  This entails explorers stumbling upon an isolated area of the world where prehistoric megafauna still thrive.  The best known example of this genre is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World; and taking their cue from Jules Verne many writers of Lost World epics set their tales in a subterranean world (such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core).

How did these genres come into being, and why were they popular for a time?  For a start, their literary antecedents were the utopian fictions (such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis) and fantastic voyage satires (the premier example being Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Even as late at 1901, Robert Ames Bennett's Lost Race classic Thyra: a Romance of the Polar Pit still contains elements taken from the utopian writings.  But, unlike true utopian fiction, Lost Race Romances are not ultimately didactic in aim: they are escapist adventures aimed at a mass (and often juvenile) audience.  As such, they reflect many of the trends in Western society which were taking place at that time.  These include a drastic change in the understanding of history brought on by the finds of archaeologists and biologists, most especially the theory of human evolution and the epoch-making excavation of the ancient cities of the Near East; and the expansion of a post-industrial Western culture into every corner of the globe, with the attendant discovery and cataloguing of peoples living an "archaic" lifestyle.  In spite of the furor that the debate over evolution sparked, the public in general evinced a hunger to learn about both the remote past and contemporary "primitive" cultures as well (which for a long time were believed to be examples of societies which had persisted unchanged since the Stone Age).

At the same time, however, there were areas of the world which had not received the full attention of Western colonial and scientific scrutiny: it was not until 1912 that the Grand Canyon, for example, was finally mapped (not surprisingly, Lost Race writers had managed to populate this region before this with outposts of pre-Columbian Aztec urban society).  Thus, there were still unknown areas on this planet which could be easily populated with figments of one's imagination.  But by the end of the second World War, that had changed.  The entire globe had been mapped.  Well, maybe not entirely ... there are a few uncontacted peoples still out there (Papua, the Amazon), but satellite imaging tell us enough about the land on which they live to know that there are no cyclopean metropolis' of Phoenicians who still maintain an active cult of Baal in the Brazilian hinterland.

Perhaps even more than the mapping of the globe, however, a large-scale shift in Western society's perception of non-Westerners doomed the Lost Race romance.  In Lost Race Romances one can see not only the Western fascination with the exotic "other", but also the revulsion and sense of superiority toward the subjects of its colonial conquests.  Many Lost Race novels are brutally racist, so much so that it might be difficult to imagine how any but the most hardened and obsessed collector (such as myself) can even read one to the end, let alone find some kind of literary enjoyment in it.  These works are also generally misogynistic: the drastic change in the status of women that occurred subsequent to the industrial revolution is reflected in the highly conflicted portrayal of women in Lost Race fiction.  But in a world that has come to accept women in the workplace and in which the atrocities of Western imperialism are widely condemned, much of the zeitgeist which makes Lost Race and Lost World fiction relevant and exciting no longer exists.  As has been widely pointed out, it has been supplanted (albeit gradually, with much overlap in time) by interplanetary science fiction.

But to judge by the ongoing, if now limited, popularity of some of the aforementioned writers, especially Haggard, there does remain an audience for the Lost Race romances of yesteryear whose interest is not purely academic.  While I cannot speak concerning the specific opinions of individuals whom I don't know (and I sincerely hope that such individuals find this blog and feel called to leave comments!), what cotinually draws me back to Lost Race and Lost World romances is a sense of the wonder and mystery inherent in the world in which I live.  This sensibility was awakened in me at a very tender age, when I first began to read picture books about prehistoric life, Greek mythology, and civilizations of the past.  Lost Race and Lost World romances imagine a world where the possibility of the child of the modern age can visit and directly experience the worlds of the epochs in the distant past.  Unlike interplanetary science-fiction, which is almost entirely futuristic in its technological imaginings, Lost Race and Lost World romances quite obviously locate the imaginative state in the past; or, more accurately, construct a conceptual bridge between the contemporary world and the distant past in an escapist  mode, a link between who we are and the places from which we came.  Fortunately, in this day and age of speed and technology, there are still a handful of individuals like myself who doggedly persist in their antiquarian interests, and are still willing to retain the knowledge and the memory of the once-great genre of the Lost Race/Lost World romance.

Jessica Amanda Salmonsen and Violet Books

If there is any one person alive today who has ensured that the knowledge of the genre of the Lost Race Romance has not been lost, it is Jessica Amanda Salmonsen.  A resident of Bremerton, Washington, and an accomplished writer of fantastic fiction in her own right, Jessica ran a bookstore of antiquarian genre fiction out of her home for many years: the name of her business was Violet Books.  One of Jessica's specialties was Lost Race fiction; and she compiled what is still by far the most comprehensive bibliography of Lost Race romances available, "The Lost Race Checklist", which can be found on her website at www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check-guide.html.  Without this amazing piece of scholarship, neither my personal library of Lost Race Romances nor this blog would ever have been possible, and scarcely a week goes by in which I do not spend at least one or two minutes perusing it (and often three or four hours at a time!).  Jessica has now retired from bookselling, but she continues to keep her website up.  It includes not only the Lost Race Checklist, but images of original-edition artwork, plus Jessica's insightful essays on various kinds of genre fiction.  It is indispensable for anyone who holds an interest in the history of fantastic fiction.

http://www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check-guide.html
http://www.violetbooks.com/lostrace.html