She: A History of Adventure

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The curtain agitated itself a little, then suddenly between its folds there appeared a most beautiful white hand (white as snow), and with long tapering fingers, ending in the pinkest nails. The hand grasped the curtain and drew it aside, and as it did so I heard a voice, I think the softest and yet most silvery voice I ever heard. It reminded me of the murmur of a brook.”

It turned out to be a dreadful but enchanting experience when I finished it. Being one of the early works of fantasy literature, this has a sub-genre of adventure romance. It is a sad thing to own that such a commonplace book as She... so crammed with tawdry sentiment and bad English should have become the success it has undoubtedly been. It is a bad sign for English literature and English taste, and argues that the English Press which has trumpeted its success must be utterly corrupt. [90] When Ayesha in the course of ages grows hard, cynical, and regardless of that which stands between her and her ends, her love yet endures ... when at last the reward was in her sight ... she once more became (or at the moment imagined that she would become) what she had been before disillusion, disappointment, and two thousand wretched years of loneliness had turned her heart to stone ... and in her lover's very presence she is made to learn the thing she really is, and what is the end of earthly wisdom and of the loveliness she prised so highly. [96] Kor and Ayesha appear in Alan Moore's Nemo: Heart of Ice. The name Ayesha is used in Marvel comics for the female superheroine Ayesha, leader of the Sovereign race, also known as Kismet. Her portrayal in the film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 2017 as a beautiful, powerful yet ruthless and cold empress in a grand court recalls Haggard's characterisation of Ayesha. 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). [43] In such fictional narratives, the explorer is the hero, with the drama unfolding as they are cast into "the nostrum of the living past". [44] Holly and Leo are prototypes of the adventurer, who has become a critical figure in modern fiction.Prose Edda (in Icelandic). She has great possessions there; her walls are exceeding high and her gates great. Her hall is called Sleet-Cold; her dish, Hunger; Famine is her knife; Idler, her thrall; Sloven, her maidservant; Pit of Stumbling, her threshold, by which one enters; Disease, her bed; Gleaming Bale, her bed-hangings.(original Norse idiom: Éljúðnir heitir salr hennar, Hungr diskr, Sultr knífr, Ganglati þræll, Ganglöð ambátt, Fallandaforað grind, Þolmóðnir þresköldr er inn gengr, Kör sæing, Blíkjandböl ársalr hennar eða tjald.) Little, Edmund (1984). The Fantasts: Studies in J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake, Nikolay Gogol, and Kenneth Grahame. London: Ashgate. pp.111–112. ISBN 978-0-86127-212-9. See also Trail, Nancy H. (1996). Possible Worlds of the Fantastic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp.4–6. ISBN 978-0-8020-0729-2.

Witton, George (1907). "IX". Scapegoats of the Empire; The True Story of the Bushveldt Carbineers (1sted.). Melbourne, Australia: D.W. Patterson & Co. ISBN 0-207-14666-7. For a history of fantasy see Cornwell, Neil (1990). The Literary Fantastic: from Gothic to Postmodernism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 978-0-7450-0804-2. . Also Clute, John (2002). Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St Martin's. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and I can easily perceive why this novel is counted among the highest selling novels of history.She: A History of Adventure, is a novel by Henry Rider Haggard. It is one of the classics of imaginative literature, and with over 83 million copies sold in 44 different languages, one of the best-selling books of all time. She was extraordinarily popular on its release and has never been out of print since it was first published. According to literary historian Andrew M. Stauffer, "She has always been Rider Haggard's most popular and influential novel, challenged only by King Solomon's Mines in this regard". Knox-Shaw, Peter (1987). The Explorer in English Fiction. London: Palgrave MacMillan. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-312-27763-5. To overcome Leo's reluctance Ayesha takes him by the hand and leads him into the blue fire. Upon entering, Leo becomes immortal, but Ayesha's immortality is taken away, and she ages 2,000 years in minutes, dies, and crumbles into dust. Holly and Job have managed to get to Leo through the uprising, and Holly urges him to go once again into the fire to remove his immortality since a second time into the flames would do this as it had done to Ayesha. Unfortunately, the flame turns yellow again barring entry. The film ends with a despondent Leo vowing to wait for the fire to turn blue again that he might end the prospect of spending an eternity alone. Butts, Dennis (2008). "Introduction". King Solomon's Mines. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics. pp.xvi. ISBN 978-0-19-953641-2. Billali, chief of one of the Amahagger tribes, takes charge of the three men, introducing them to the ways of his people. One of the Amahagger maidens, Ustane, takes a liking to Leo and, by kissing him and embracing him publicly, weds him according to Amahagger custom. Leo, likewise, grows very fond of her.

Barron, Neil (1995). Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction (4thed.). New Jersey: Libraries Unlimited. p.21. ISBN 978-0-8352-3684-3. I'd never read this classic of adventure-fantasy before. For some reason, I'd always assumed the the author was a contemporary of Robert E. Howard, and that it was published sometime in the 1930s or thereabouts. Not so! It was published in 1887! Despite such criticism, the reception that met She was overwhelmingly positive and echoed the sentiments expressed by anthropologist and literary critic Andrew Lang before the story's first publication: "I think She is one of the most astonishing romances I ever read. The more impossible it is, the better you do it, till it seems like a story from the literature of another planet". [91] Murphy, Patricia (1 November 1999). "The Gendering of History in She". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 39 (4): 747–72. doi: 10.1353/sel.1999.0036. ISSN 1522-9270. PMID 20169694. S2CID 36100703.She: A History of Adventure is a novel by H. Rider Haggard. First printed in a series of installments for the magazine The Graphic in the winter of 1886-87, it was one of the first pieces of serial literature to reach a large popular audience. Told in the first person by the protagonist, Horace Holly, the story concerns his expedition with his friend’s son, Leo Vincey to a forgotten mythologized kingdom in the heart of Africa. Upon reaching the dense jungle in the interior of the continent, they befall a civilization of native people ruled by a queen, Ayesha, who appears to be white. Ayesha is hailed simply as “She,” stemming from the natives’ mantra, “She-who-must-be-obeyed.” The novel is best known for inaugurating the archetype of the “lost world,” which has since been recapitulated countless times by authors, such as H.G. Wells, and franchises, such as Jurassic Park. See what the narrator felt of "She" when he saw her for the first time emerging from behind the curtain... 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. [45] 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". [46] 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:

Haggard, Lilias Rider (1951). The Cloak That I Left Behind: A Biography of the Author Henry Rider Haggard KBE. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Nicholson, Mervyn (Fall 1998). "C.S. Lewis and the scholarship of imagination in E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard". Renascence: 10. She has been adapted for the cinema at least eleven times, beginning with the 1899 short film The Pillar of Fire, directed by Georges Méliès, [109] followed by another short film directed by Edwin S. Porter in 1908. An American 1911 version starred Marguerite Snow, a British-produced version appeared in 1916, and in 1917 Valeska Suratt appeared in a production for Fox which is lost. In 1925 a silent film of She, starring Betty Blythe, was produced with the active participation of Rider Haggard, who wrote the intertitles. The film combines elements from all the books in the series. Lovegrove, James (19 January 2013). "Resurrection Engines: 16 Extraordinary Tales of Scientific Romance". Financial Times. ProQuest 1270927459. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: yes, this book is very much a product of its time. It concerns a group of British men exploring Africa, so you can imagine that the racial politics are…not ideal. Also the central “She” of the book, the goddess/demon ruler of a lost civilization, is described as impossibly beautiful, which means she has to also be white, logic be damned. In short, this is an adventure story written by old white dudes, for old white dudes, so buyer beware.

Murray, Tim (1993). "Archaeology and the threat of the past: Sir Henry Rider Haggard and the acquisition of time". World Archaeology. 25 (2): 175–186. doi: 10.1080/00438243.1993.9980236.