Rider Haggard's writing style was much criticised in reviews of She and his other works. His harshest critic was Augustus Moore, who wrote: "God help English literature when English people lay aside their Waverley novels, and the works of Defoe, Swift, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and even Charles Reade, for the penny dreadfuls of Mr Haggard." He added: "The man who could write 'he spoke to She' can have no ear at all."[50] A more common sentiment was expressed in the anonymous review of She in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine: "Mr Rider Haggard is not an exquisite workman like Mr [Robert Louis] Stevenson, but he has a great deal of power in his way, and rougher qualities which are more likely, perhaps, to 'take the town' than skill more delicate."[51]
Modern literary criticism has tended to be more circumspect. As Daniel Karlin has noted, "That Haggard's style is frequently bathetic or clumsy cannot be denied; but the matter is not so easily settled."[52] Stauffer cites the passage in which Holly meditates as he tries to fall asleep as emblematic of "the charges against" Haggard's writing.[53] In this scene Holly lies down and
Above me ... shone the eternal stars. ... Oh that we should shake loose the prisoned pinions of the soul and soar to that superior point, whence, like to some traveller looking out through space from Darien's giddiest peak, we might gaze with the spiritual eyes of noble thoughts deep into Infinity! What would it be to cast off this earthly robe, to have done for ever with these earthly thoughts and miserable desires. ... Yes, to cast them off, to have done with the foul and thorny places of the world; and like those glittering points above me, to rest on high wrapped forever in the brightness of our better selves, that even now shines in us as fire faintly shines within those lurid balls ...[54]
The passage concludes with a wry remark from Holly: "I at last managed to get to sleep, a fact for which anybody who reads this narrative, if anybody ever does, may very probably be thankful."[55] According to Stauffer, "the disarming deflation of the passage goes a long way toward redeeming it, and is typical of the winning contradictions of the narrator's style".[56] Tom Pocock in Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire has also highlighted the "literary framework" that Haggard constructs throughout much of the narrative, referencing Keats, Shakespeare and Classical literature to imbue the story with a "Gothic sensibility".[57] Yet as Stauffer notes, "Ultimately, however, one thinks of Haggard's plots, episodes, and images as the source of his lasting reputation and influence."[56]
