She: A History of Adventure H. Rider Haggard

Fantasy and science fiction

She is one of the foundational works of fantasy literature, coming around the time of The Princess and the Goblin (1858) by George MacDonald, William Morris' The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World's End, and the short stories of Lord Dunsany.[35] It is marked by a strong element of "the marvelous" in the figure of Ayesha, a two-thousand-year-old sorceress, and the 'Spirit of the World', an undying fire that confers immortality.[36] Indeed, Haggard's story is one of the first in modern literature to feature "a slight intrusion of something unreal" into a very real world – a hallmark of the fantasy genre.[37] Similarly, the carefully constructed "fantasy history" of She foreshadows the use of this technique that characterises later fantasies such as The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time series, and which imparts a "degree of security" to the secondary world.[38] However, the story of She is firmly ensconced in what fantasy theorists call 'primary world reality', with the lost kingdom of Kôr, the realm ruled by the supernatural She, a fantastic "Tertiary World" at once directly part of and at the same time indirectly set apart from normative "primary" reality.[39] Along with Haggard's prior novel, King Solomon's Mines, She laid the blueprints for the "lost world" subgenre in fantasy literature, as well as the convention of the "lost race".[40] As Brantlinger has noted of the novel's importance to the development of the "secondary world" in fantasy literature: "Haggard may seem peripheral to the development of science fiction, and yet his African quest romances could easily be transposed to other planets and galaxies".[25] In his history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss notes the frequency with which Ayesha's death in the Pillar of Fire has been imitated by later science fiction and fantasy writers: "From Haggard on, crumbling women, priestesses, or empresses – all symbols of women as Untouchable and Unmakeable – fill the pages of many a scientific romance".[41]

Adventure romance

She is part of the adventure subgenre of literature which was especially popular at the end of the 19th century, but which remains an important form of fiction to the present day. Along with works such as Treasure Island (1883) and Prince Otto (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jules Verne's A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1871) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1875), She had an important formative effect on the development of the adventure novel. Indeed, Rider Haggard is credited with inventing the romance of archaeological exploration which began in King Solomon's Mines and crystallised in She. One of the most notable modern forms of this genre is the Indiana Jones movie series, as well as the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000).[42] In such fictional narratives, the explorer is the hero, with the drama unfolding as they are cast into "the nostrum of the living past".[43] Holly and Leo are prototypes of the adventurer, who has become a critical figure in modern fiction.

Imperial Gothic

She is also one of the central texts in the development of Imperial Gothic. Many late-Victorian authors during the fin de siècle employed Gothic conventions and motifs in their writing, stressing and alluding to the supernatural, the ghostly, and the demonic.[44] As Brantlinger has noted, "Connected to imperialist adventure fiction, these interests often imply anxieties about the stability of Britain, of the British Empire, or, more generally, of Western civilisation".[45] Novels like Dracula and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde present depictions of repressed, foreign, and demonic forces at the heart of the imperial polity. In She the danger is raised in the form of Ayesha herself:

The terrible She had evidently made up her mind to go to England, and it made me absolutely shudder to think what would be the result of her arrival there... In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world had ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.[46]

She's threat to replace Queen Victoria with herself echoes the underlying anxiety over European colonialism emblematic of the Imperial Gothic genre.[47] Indeed, Judith Wilt characterises the narrative of She, in which the penetration into Africa (represented by Holly, Leo, and Job) suddenly suffers a potential "counter-attack" (from Ayesha), as one of the archetypal illustrations of the "reverse colonialism" motif in Victorian Gothic.[48] Similarly, She marks one of the first fictional examples to raise the spectre of the natural decline of civilisation, and by extension, British imperial power, which would become an increasingly frequent theme in Gothic and invasion literature until the onset of World War I.[49]