HAGGARD, Sir H(enry) Rider

(1856-1925)

   UK civil servant, lawyer, agricultural expert and writer. HRH spent the years 1875-81 in the Colonial Service in South Africa, where he gained much of the material for his fiction. On his return to the UK he read for the bar while at the same time beginning to produce novels and other work. With his third and fourth novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and the even more successful She: A History of Adventure (1886-7 The Graphic; cut 1886 US; text restored 1887 UK; The Annotated She (1991 US) ed Norman Etherington is a variorum text with erratic additional notes), HRH was catapulted into fame, and soon left the bar; he was knighted in1912. These novels of anthropological sf remain his most famous; they established a pattern he would follow for the rest of his career. That pattern might be described as a central model for Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and the SCIENCE-FANTASY subgenre whose popularity attended the latter's revival in the 1960s: it is a pattern in which realistic portraits of the contemporary world (in HRH's case South Africa) are combined with backward-looking displacements (in his case invoking LOST WORLDS, IMMORTALITY and REINCARNATION) to give a general effect of deep nostalgia.HRH was fascinated by ruins, ancient civilizations and primitive customs. His allied interest in the PSEUDO-SCIENCE of Spiritualism link him to such contemporaries as Bulwer LYTTON and Marie CORELLI, though in fact his central literary friendships were with Andrew LANG and Rudyard KIPLING; he shared with the latter a fin de siecle sense - which proved entirely accurate - that the British Empire was on the wane. His prose was sometimes overblown, but he was a gifted storyteller with a powerful imagination and the ability to create memorable heroic figures, like the Zulu Umslopogaas, whose early life is the subject of the remarkable Nadathe Lily (1892 US).Umslopogaas appears also in HRH's principal sequence, the novels about white hunter Allan Quatermain which gave Africa to the world as a haven in the mind's eye. Here the Quatermain books are given in order of internal chronology, the dates of their settings preceding the titles: 1835-8 Marie (1912); 1842-69 Allan's Wife (1887), which was incorporated into Allan's Wife and Other Tales (coll 1889); 1854-6 Child of Storm (1913); 1859 Maiwa's Revenge (1888); 1870 The Holy Flower (1915; vt Allan and the Holy Flower 1915 US); 1871 Heu-Heu, or The Monster (1924); 1872 She and Allan (1921 US); 1873 The Treasure of the Lake (1926US); 1874 The Ivory Child (1916); 1879 Finished (1916 US); 1879 "Magepa the Buck" in Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales (coll 1920); 1880 King Solomon's Mines; 1882 The Ancient Allan (1920); 1883 Allan and the IceGods: A Tale of Beginnings (1927); 1884-5 Allan Quatermain: Being an Account of his Further Adventures and Discoveries in Company with Sir Henry Curtis, Bart., Commander John Good, and one Umslopogaas (1887; cut vt Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold * 1986, the text being shaped into a film novelization). A heavily cut version of She was published a decade later (1896 UK); the abridgement may have been done by W(illiam) T(homas) Stead (1849-1912), who edited the series in which itappeared.Not all these books could be described as science fantasy, but all project that sense of desiderium - the longing for that which is lost - that lies at the heart of true science fantasy; and those titles writtenlate in HRH's career - like The Ancient Allan, a tale of love-death set in Egypt, and Allan and the Ice Gods, in which Quatermain is thrown back intime by means of a drug and inhabits the body of a paleolithic man - tend to express their author's potent (but submerged) sexuality in venues so remote that a suppressed libidinousness can become, occasionally, almost explicit.It is, however, in the Ayesha sequence that HRH's Victorian libido found easiest release from the chains of the present. In She: A History of Adventure (rewritten for the movies by Don Ward as She: TheStory Retold * 1949 US), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905; vt The Return of She: Ayesha 1967 US), She and Allan, which provides a link with the Quatermain series, and Wisdom's Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923), HRH created, in the immortal and subversive Ayesha, what has come to seem an abiding emblem of that longing for "primitive" transcendence that typically marks the end of eras. The sudden ageing of Ayesha in the first volume of the sequence (later volumes dally inconsequentially with her earlier life) has an effect both tragic and petty. The World's Desire (1890), with Andrew Lang, a pendant to the main series, carries Odysseus into new adventures, during which he discovers that Helen of Troy and Ayesha are one. A knotted eroticism also infuses When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin,Bickley, and Arbuthnot (1919), a novel plotted in part by Kipling (who later helped HRH with Allan and the Ice Gods): the three eponymous Victorians find the high priest of ATLANTIS in SUSPENDED ANIMATION; havingcaused the first Flood, he is about to start another; his daughter, likewise discovered, causes ructions in the hearts of the three.HRH can seem both heated and evasive to modern readers, but read in context he is a figure of very considerable power, a stirrer in deep waters.

   DP/JC

   Other works: Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand (1889 US); Beatrice (1890); Eric Brighteyes (1891); Montezuma's Daughter (1893); ThePeople of the Mist (1894); Heart of the World (1895); The Wizard (1896); Swallow: A Tale of the Great Trek (1899 US); Elissa, the Doom of Zimbabwe: Black Heart \& White Heart (coll 1900 US; rev vt Black Heart and White Heart and Other Stories; title story of US edition only, vt Elissa, or The Doom of Zimbabwe 1917 UK); Lysbeth: A Tale of the Dutch (1901 US); Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies (1903 US); Pearl-Maiden: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem (1903); The Brethren (1903); Benita (1906; vt The Spirit of Bambatse 1906 US); The Yellow God: An Idol of Africa (1908 US);The Ghost Kings (1908; vt The Lady of the Heavens 1908 US); The Lady of Blossholme (1909); Morning Star (1910); Queen Sheba's Ring (1910); Red Eve (1911); The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story (1911); The Wanderer's Necklace (1914); Moon of Israel: A Tale of the Exodus (1918); The Missionary and the Witch-Doctor (1920 chap US); The Virgin of the Sun (1922); Queen of the Dawn: A Love Tale of Old Egypt (1925); Mary of Marion Isle (1929; vt Marion Isle 1929 US); Belshazzar (1930). There are various omnibuses.

   About the author: Bibliography of the Works of H. Rider Haggard (1947) by J.E. Scott; The Cloak that I Left (1951) by Lilias RiderHaggard; Rider Haggard: His Life and Work (1960) by Morton Cohen; The Wheel of Empire (1967) by Alan Sandison; Rider Haggard (1984) by Norman Etherington.

   See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; DIME-NOVEL SF; HISTORY OF SF; ORIGIN OF MAN; PULP MAGAZINES; RADIO (USA); SERIES; SEX.