According to Haggard's daughter Lilias, the phrase "She-who-must-be-obeyed" originated from his childhood and "the particularly hideous aspect" of one rag-doll: "This doll was something of a fetish, and Rider, as a small child, was terrified of her, a fact soon discovered by an unscrupulous nurse who made full use of it to frighten him into obedience. Why or how it came to be called She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed he could not remember."[23] Haggard wrote that "the title She" was taken "from a certain rag doll, so named, which a nurse at Bradenham used to bring out of some dark recess in order to terrify those of my brothers and sisters who were in her charge."[24]
In his autobiography, Haggard writes of how he composed She in six weeks in February and March 1886, having just completed Jess, which was published in 1887. Haggard claimed that this was an intensely creative period: the text "was never rewritten, and the manuscript carries but few corrections". Haggard went on to declare: "The fact is that it was written at white heat, almost without rest, and that is the best way to compose." He admitted to having had no clear story in mind when he began writing:
I remember that when I sat down to the task my ideas as to its development were of the vaguest. The only clear notion that I had in my head was that of an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love. All the rest shaped itself round this figure. And it came – it came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down.
Various scholars have detected a number of analogues to She in earlier literature. According to Brantlinger, Haggard certainly read the stories of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in particular A Strange Story (1862), which includes a mysterious veiled woman called "Ayesha", and The Coming Race (1871), which is about the discovery of a subterranean civilisation.[25] Similarly, the name of the underground civilisation in She, known as Kôr, is derived from Norse mythological romance, where the deathbed of the goddess Hel is called Kör, which means "disease" in Old Norse.[26] In She, a plague destroyed the original inhabitants of Kôr.
According to Haggard, he wrote the final scene of Ayesha's demise while waiting for his literary agent, A. P. Watt, to return to his office. Once he had completed it he entered Watt's office and threw the manuscript "on the table, with the remark: 'There is what I shall be remembered by'".[27]
Various traditions of female monarchy on the African continent were also precursors. A reference to one such influence on She appears in Lieutenant George Witton's 1907 book Scapegoats of the Empire; The True Story of the Bushveldt Carbineers:
By midday we reached the Letaba Valley, in the Majajes Mountains, inhabited by a powerful tribe of natives once ruled by a princess said to be the prototype of Rider Haggard's "She".[28][29]
Publication
She was first published as a serial story in The Graphic, a large folio magazine printed weekly in London, between October 1886 and January 1887. The serialisation was accompanied with illustrations by E. K. Johnson. An American edition was published by Harper & Bros. in New York on 24 December 1886; this included Johnson's illustrations. On 1 January 1887 a British edition was published by Longmans, Green, & Co., without any illustrations. It featured significant textual revisions by Haggard.[30] He made further revisions for the British edition of 1888, which included new illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen and C. H. M. Kerr. In 2006 Broadview published the first edition of She since 1887 to reproduce the Graphic serial text.[31]
Narrative revisions
Rider Haggard's recreation of the Sherd of Amenartas, now in the collection of the Norwich Castle MuseumHaggard contended that romances such as She or King Solomon's Mines were best left unrevised because "wine of this character loses its bouquet when it is poured from glass to glass".[32] However, he made a number of alterations to the Graphic version of She before its publication as a novel in 1887. One of the most significant was to the third chapter concerning the sherd, which was substantially expanded from the original to include the tale of Amenartas in uncial and cursive Greek scripts. Facsimile illustrations were also included of an antique vase, made up by Haggard's sister-in-law Agnes Barber to resemble the sherd of Amenartas. A number of footnotes were also included containing historical references by the narrator. Haggard was keen to stress the historicity of the narrative, improving some of the information about geography and about ancient civilisations in Chapters 4, 13, and 17.[33]
The 1887 edition of the novel also features a substantially rewritten version of the "hotpot" scene in Chapter 8, when Mahomed is killed. In the original serialisation the cannibal Amahagger grow restless and hungry, and place a large heated pot over Mahomed's head, enacting the hotpotting ritual before eating him. Haggard's stories were criticised at the time for their violence, and he toned this scene down, so that Mahomed dies when Holly shoots him accidentally in the scuffle with the Amahagger. Comparing the serial and novel editions of She, Stauffer describes the more compact narrative of the original as a reflection of the intense burst of creativity in which Haggard composed the story, arguing that "the style and grammar of the Graphic [edition] is more energetic and immediate", although, as he noted, it is also "sometimes more flawed".[34]
Haggard continued to revise She for later editions. The "New Edition" of 1888 contains more than 400 minor alterations. The last revision by Haggard was in 1896.[33]
