She

Haggard, H. Rider

ISBN 10: 0805511776 / ISBN 13: 9780805511772

Published by Hart Publishing Company, Inc., New York, NY, U.S.A., 1976

About this Item

"With Thirty-two Illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen and Charles H. M. Kerr". 1976 version with "Cover by Stanislaw Fernandes". May NOT match stock image. Cover has rubs, small bumped corners and spine edges, slight curl/crease to top edge, sticker taped to bottom of spine, tanning along edges and scuffs. 1" x 2" scrape where sticker removed on first page; also ink stamp at top corner first page. Otherwise pages are clean. Binding is slightly cocked. NOT bookclub - price on front flap; 8.25" tall, pages.

Seller Inventory # 9954986

Bibliographic Details

• Title: She
• Publisher: Hart Publishing Company, Inc., New York, NY, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 1976
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805511776
• ISBN 13: 9780805511772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Greiffenhagen, Maurice; Kerr, Charles H. M.
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Kitchen

About this title

Synopsis

Although aware that many of his ancestors have failed in the same mission, a young Englishman attempts to find the mysterious white queen who rules a lost African civilization.

Review

Ayesha is She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, a 2,000-year-old queen who rules a fabled lost city deep in a maze of African caverns. She has the occult wisdom of Isis, the eternal youth and beauty of Aphrodite, and the violent appetite of a lamia. Like A. Conan Doyle's Lost World, She is one of those magnificent Victorian yarns about an expedition to a far-off locale shadowed by magic, mystery, and death.

Tim Stout writes, in Horror: 100 Best Books, "As the plot takes hold one has the fancy that [Ayesha] had always existed, in some dark dimension of the imagination, and that [H. Rider] Haggard was the fortunate author to whom she chose to reveal herself." Haggard did, in fact, write this book in a six-week burst of feverish inspiration: "It came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down," he later said.

This edition of the 1887 classic features an introductory essay by literary critic Regina Barreca, who likens Ayesha to Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--"literally fantastic female figures who must be stopped before they love again."