She

Haggard, H. Rider

ISBN 10: 1902058038 / ISBN 13: 9781902058030

Published by Pulp Pub, 1998

About this Item

Your purchase helps support Sri Lankan Children's Charity 'The Rainbow Centre'. Ex-library, so some stamps and wear, but in good overall condition. Our donations to The Rainbow Centre have helped provide an education and a safe haven to hundreds of children who live in appalling conditions.

Seller Inventory # Z1-G-001-02609

Bibliographic Details

• Title: She
• Publisher: Pulp Pub
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1902058038
• ISBN 13: 9781902058030
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

A runaway bestseller on its publication in 1887, H. Rider Haggard's She is a Victorian thrill ride of a novel, featuring a lost African kingdom ruled by a mysterious, implacable queen; ferocious wildlife and yawning abysses; and an eerie love story that spans two thousand years. She has bewitched readers from Freud and Jung to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; in her Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic - which includes period illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen and Charles H.M. Kerr - Margaret Atwood asserts that the awe-inspiring Ayesha, "She-who-must-be-obeyed," is "a permanent feature of the human imagination."

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."