She (novel)
Encyclopedia
She, subtitled A History of Adventure, is a novel by Henry Rider Haggard
H. Rider Haggard
Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a founder of the Lost World literary genre. He was also involved in agricultural reform around the British Empire...

, first serialized in The Graphic
The Graphic
The Graphic was a British weekly illustrated newspaper, first published on 4 December 1869 by William Luson Thomas's company Illustrated Newspapers Limited....

magazine from October 1886 to January 1887. She 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. Extraordinarily popular upon its release, She has never been out of print. According to the literary historian Andrew M. Stauffer, "She has always been Rider Haggard's most popular and influential novel, challenged only by King Solomon's Mines
King Solomon's Mines
King Solomon's Mines is a popular novel by the Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party...

in this regard".

The story is a first-person narrative that follows the journey of Horace Holly and his ward Leo Vincey to a lost kingdom in the African interior. There, they encounter a primitive race of natives and a mysterious white queen, Ayesha, who reigns as the all-powerful "She", or "She-who-must-be-obeyed". In this work, Rider Haggard developed the conventions of the Lost World
Lost World (genre)
The Lost World literary genre is a fantasy or science fiction genre that involves the discovery of a new world out of time, place, or both. It began as a subgenre of the late-Victorian imperial romance and remains popular to this day....

 sub-genre, which many later authors emulated.

She is placed firmly in the imperialist literature of nineteenth-century England, and inspired by Rider Haggard's experiences of South Africa and British colonialism. The story expresses numerous racial and evolutionary conceptions of the late-Victorians, especially notions of degeneration and racial decline prominent during the fin de siècle
Fin de siècle
Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...

. In the figure of She, the novel notably explored themes of female authority and feminine behaviour. It has received praise and criticism alike for its gendered representation of womanhood.

Synopsis

A Cambridge University professor, Horace Holly, and his ward, Leo Vincey, together with their servant, Job, travel to Africa. They follow instructions on the "Sherd of Amenartas" left to Vincey by his father. They travel to Africa and suffer shipwreck on the eastern shore of Central Africa. They survive together with an Arab, Mahomed, and journey into an unexplored part of the African interior, where they discover the lost kingdom of Kôr, inhabited by the primitive Amahagger people. The adventurers learn that the natives are ruled by a fearsome white queen, who is worshiped as Hiya or "She-who-must-be-obeyed". The Amahagger are curious about the white-skinned interlopers; She had warned them of their coming.

Billali, the chief elder 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 Vincey and during a tribal feast sings lovingly to him. Billali tells Holly that he needs to go and report the white men's arrival to She. In his absence, some of the Amahagger become restless and determine to eat Mahomed as part of a ritual "hotpot". In a scuffle Mahomed is killed and Vincey gravely wounded, but the three Englishmen are saved when Billali returns and declares that they are under the protection of She. As Vincey's condition worsens, he approaches death although tended by Ustane.

They are taken to the home of She, which lies under a dormant volcano
Volcano
2. Bedrock3. Conduit 4. Base5. Sill6. Dike7. Layers of ash emitted by the volcano8. Flank| 9. Layers of lava emitted by the volcano10. Throat11. Parasitic cone12. Lava flow13. Vent14. Crater15...

 amongst a series of cavernous tombs. There, Holly is presented to the queen, a white sorceress
Magician (fantasy)
A magician, mage, sorcerer, sorceress, wizard, enchanter, enchantress, thaumaturge or a person known under one of many other possible terms is someone who uses or practices magic that derives from supernatural or occult sources...

 named Ayesha. Her beauty is so great that it enchants any man who beholds it. She, who is veiled and lies behind a partition, warns Holly that the power of her splendour arouses both desire and fear, but he is dubious. When she shows herself, however, Holly is enraptured and prostrates himself before her. He learns that She has lived in the realm of Kôr for over two millennia, awaiting the reincarnated return of her lover, Kallikrates (whom she had accidentally slain in a fit of jealous rage). After she veils herself again, Holly remembers Vincey and begs Ayesha to visit his ward. Having agreed, she is startled upon seeing him, as she believes him to be the reincarnation of Kallikrates.

She heals Vincey but becomes jealous of the girl, Ustane. The latter is ordered to leave the home of She-who-must-be-obeyed but refuses, and is eventually struck down by She. Despite the murder of their friend, Holly and Vincey cannot free themselves from the power of She's beauty. They remain amongst the tombs as Vincey recovers his strength, and She lectures Holly on the ancient history of Kôr.

In the climax of the novel, Ayesha takes the two men to see the pillar of fire, passing through the ruined city of Kôr. She is determined that Vincey should bathe in the fire to become immortal and remain with her forever. They come to a great cavern, but at the last Vincey doubts the safety of entering the flame. To allay his fears, She steps into the Spirit of Life. With this second immersion, she reverts to her true age, withering away in the fire. The sight is so shocking that Job dies in fright. Before dying, She tells Vincey, "I die not. I shall come again."

Characters

  • Horace Holly - protagonist and narrator, Holly is a Cambridge don whose keen intellect and knowledge was developed to compensate for his ape-like appearance. Holly knows a number of ancient languages, including Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, which allow him to communicate with the Amahagger (who speak a form of Arabic) and She (who knows all three languages). Holly's interest in archaeology and the origins of civilization lead him to explore the ruins of Kor.
  • Leo Vincey - ward of Horace Holly, Vincey is an attractive, physically active young English gentleman with a thick head of blond hair. He is the confidant of Holly and befriends Ustane. According to She, Leo resembles Kallikrates in appearance and is his reincarnation.
  • Ayesha - the title character of the novel, called Hiya by the native Amahagger, or "She". Ayesha was born over 2,000 years ago amongst the Arabs, mastering the lore of the ancients and becoming a great sorceress. Learning of the Pillar of Life in the African interior, she journeyed to the ruined kingdom of Kôr, feigning friendship with a hermit who was the keeper of the Flame that granted immortality. She bathed in the Pillar of Life's fire.
  • Job - Holly's trusted servant. Job is a working-class man and highly suspicious and judgmental of non-English peoples. He is also a devout Protestant. Of all the travellers, he is especially disgusted by the Amahagger and fearful of She.
  • Billali - an elder of one of the Amahagger tribes.
  • Ustane - an Amahagger maiden. She becomes romantically attached to Vincey, caring for him when he is injured, acting as his protector, and defying She to stay with him.
  • Kallikrates - an ancient Greek, the husband of Amenartas, and ancestor of Vincey. Two thousand years ago, he and Amenartas fled Egypt, seeking a haven in the African interior where they met Ayesha. There, She fell in love with him, promising to give him the secret of immortality if he would kill Amenartas. He refused, and enraged She struck him down.
  • Amenartas - an ancient Egyptian priestess and ancestress of the Vincey family. As a priestess of Isis
    Isis
    Isis or in original more likely Aset is a goddess in Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. She was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the matron of nature and magic...

    , she was protected from the power of She. When Ayesha slew Kallikrates, she expelled Amenartas from her realm. Amenartas gave birth to Kallikrates' son, beginning the line of the Vinceys.

South Africa

In 1875, Haggard was sent to Cape Town, South Africa, as secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer, the lieutenant-governor of Natal
Colony of Natal
The Colony of Natal was a British colony in south-eastern Africa. It was proclaimed a British colony on May 4, 1843 after the British government had annexed the Boer Republic of Natalia, and on 31 May 1910 combined with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa, as one of its...

. In his memoirs Haggard wrote of his aspirations to become a colonial governor himself, and of his youthful excitement at the prospects. The major event during his time in Africa was Britain's annexation in 1877 of the Transvaal. Haggard was part of the expedition that established British control over the Boer republic
Boer Republics
The Boer Republics were independent self-governed republics created by the northeastern frontier branch of the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the north eastern Cape Province and their descendants in mainly the northern and eastern parts of what is now the country of...

, and on 24 May 1877 helped raise the Union flag over the capital, Pretoria. Writing of the moment, Haggard declared:
Haggard had advocated the British annexation of the Boer republic in a journal article, "The Transvaal", published in the May 1877 issue of Macmillan's Magazine. Haggard maintained that it was Britain's "mission to conquer and hold in subjection" lesser races, "not from thirst of conquest but for the sake of law, justice, and order". However, Boer resistance to British rule and the resulting Anglo-Zulu war
Anglo-Zulu War
The Anglo-Zulu War was fought in 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom.Following the imperialist scheme by which Lord Carnarvon had successfully brought about federation in Canada, it was thought that a similar plan might succeed with the various African kingdoms, tribal areas and...

 caused the imperial government in London to withdraw from pursuing British sovereignty over the South African interior. Haggard considered this to be a "great betrayal" by Prime Minister Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS was a British Liberal statesman. In a career lasting over sixty years, he served as Prime Minister four separate times , more than any other person. Gladstone was also Britain's oldest Prime Minister, 84 years old when he resigned for the last time...

 and the Liberal Party, which "no lapse of time ever can solace or even alleviate". He became increasingly disillusioned with the realities of colonial Africa. As the Victorian scholar Patrick Brantlinger notes in his introduction to She: "Little that Haggard witnessed matched the romantic depictions of 'the dark continent' in boys' adventure novels, in the press, and even in such bestselling explorers' journals as David Livingstone's
David Livingstone
David Livingstone was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and an explorer in Africa. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr...

 Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857)."

During his time in South Africa, Haggard developed an intense hatred for the Boers, but also came to admire the Zulus. However, his admiration of the Zulus did not extend to other African peoples; rather, he shared many of the racist assumptions that underlay contemporary Victorian politics and philosophy
New Imperialism
New Imperialism refers to the colonial expansion adopted by Europe's powers and, later, Japan and the United States, during the 19th and early 20th centuries; expansion took place from the French conquest of Algeria until World War I: approximately 1830 to 1914...

, such as those expressed by James Hunt, the President of the Anthropological Society of London
Anthropological Society of London
The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863 by Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt. It broke away from the existing Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, and defined itself in opposition to the older society...

: "the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European...[and] can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans. The analogies are far more numerous between the Negro and apes, than between the European and apes." The Victorian belief in the inherent inferiority of the 'darker races', made them the object of a civilising impulse in the European Scramble for Africa
Scramble for Africa
The Scramble for Africa, also known as the Race for Africa or Partition of Africa was a process of invasion, occupation, colonization and annexation of African territory by European powers during the New Imperialism period, between 1881 and World War I in 1914...

. Although disenchanted with the colonial effort, Haggard remained committed to this ideology. He believed that the British "alone of all the nations in the world appear to be able to control coloured races without the exercise of cruelty".

Return to Britain

In 1881 Rider Haggard returned to Britain. At the time, England was increasingly beset by the social and cultural anxieties that marked the fin de siècle
Fin de siècle
Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...

. One of the most prominent concerns was the fear of political and racial decline, encapsulated in Max Nordau's
Max Nordau
Max Simon Nordau , born Simon Maximilian Südfeld in Pest, Hungary, was a Zionist leader, physician, author, and social critic....

 Degeneration
Degeneration (Max Nordau)
Degeneration , was Max Nordau's major work. It is a moralistic attack on so-called degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of a range of rising social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization and its perceived effects on the human body.-Summary:Nordau begins his work...

(1895). Where barely half a century earlier Thomas Babington Macaulay had declared "the history of England" to be "emphatically the history of progress", late-Victorians living in the wake of Darwinian evolution had lost the earlier positivism of their age. Uncertainty over the immutability of Britain's historical identity, what historian Tim Murray has called the "threat of the past", was manifested in the Victorian obsession with ancient times and archaeology. Haggard was greatly interested in the ruins (re)discovered at Zimbabwe in the 1870s. In 1896 he provided the preface to a monograph that detailed a history of the site, declaring:
Haggard was strongly influenced by archaeology and evolutionary theories, especially ideas about the "racialisation" of historical decline prevalent during the fin de siècle. His distaste for the Boers stemmed in part from their depiction as a 'mixed' race, descended from various European stock and intermarried with African locals. Lack of racial purity was seen as leading to evolutionary degeneration and national decline, a concept he embodied in the Ammahger people.

By the time Haggard began writing She, society had more anxiety about the role of women. Debates regarding "The Woman Question", as well as anxieties over the increasing position and independence of the "New Woman
New Woman
The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century. The New Woman pushed the limits set by male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen . "The New Woman sprang fully armed from Ibsen's brain," according to a joke by Max Beerbohm...

", dominated Britain during the fin de siècle. Alarm over social degeneration and societal decadence further fanned concerns over the woman's movement and female liberalisation, which challenged the traditional conception of Victorian womanhood
Women in the Victorian era
The status of women in the Victorian era is often seen as an illustration of the striking discrepancy between the United Kingdom's national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions. During the era symbolized by the reign of British monarch Queen...

. The role and rights of women had changed dramatically since the early part of the century, as they entered the workforce, received better education, and gained more political and legal independence. Writing in 1894, Haggard believed that marriage was the natural state for women: "Notwithstanding the energetic repudiations of the fact that confront us at every turn, it may be taken for granted that in most cases it is the natural mission of women to marry; that - always in most cases - if they do not marry they become narrowed, live a half life only, and suffer in health of body and of mind." Despite such conservative sentiments, Haggard did not view women as inferior to men. He created the character of She-who-must-be-obeyed ", who provided a touchstone for many of the anxieties surrounding the New Woman in late-Victorian England".

Concept and creation

According to Haggard's daughter Lilias, the phrase "She-who-must-be-obeyed" originated from his childhood and "the particularly hideous aspect" of one rag-doll: "This doll was something of a fetish, and Rider, as a small child, was terrified of her, a fact soon discovered by an unscrupulous nurse who made full use of it to frighten him into obedience. Why or how it came to be called She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed he could not remember". Haggard wrote that "the title She" was taken "from a certain rag doll, so named, which a nurse at Bradenham used to bring out of some dark recess in order to terrify those of my brothers and sisters who were in her charge."

In his autobiography, Haggard spoke of how he composed She within a six-week period of February and March 1886, having just completed Jess, which was published in 1887. Haggard claimed this period was an intensely creative moment: the text "was never rewritten, and the manuscript carries but few corrections". Haggard went on to declare: "The fact is that it was written at white heat, almost without rest, and that is the best way to compose." He admitted to having had no clear story in mind when he began writing:
Various scholars have detected a number of analogues to She in earlier literature. According to Brantlinger, Haggard certainly read and was aware of the stories of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in particular A Strange Story (1862) which includes a mysterious, veiled woman called "Ayesha", and The Coming Race (1871) about the discovery of a subterranean civilisation. Similarly, the name of the underground civilisation in She, known as Kôr, derives from Norse mythological romance, where the "deathbed" of the goddess Hel
Hel (being)
In Norse mythology, Hel is a being who presides over a realm of the same name, where she receives a portion of the dead. Hel is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson...

 is called Kör and means "disease" in Old Norse. In She, a plague destroyed the original inhabitants of Kôr.

According to Haggard, he wrote the final scene of She's demise whilst waiting for his literary agent, A. P. Watt, to return to his offices. Upon completion, he entered Watt's office and threw the manuscript "...on the table with the remark: 'There is what I shall be remembered by'".

Publication

She was first published as a serial story in the Graphic
The Graphic
The Graphic was a British weekly illustrated newspaper, first published on 4 December 1869 by William Luson Thomas's company Illustrated Newspapers Limited....

, a large folio magazine printed weekly in London, between October 1886 and January 1887. The serialisation was accompanied with illustrations by E. K. Johnson. An American edition was published by Harper and Bros. in New York on 24 December 1886; this included the Johnson illustrations. On 1 January 1887, an English edition was published by Longmans, Green, and Co., but without any images. It was the first publication of She in book format, and featured significant textual revisions from the Graphic serial made by Haggard. He made further revisions for an 1888 edition, which included illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen and C. H. M. Kerr. In 2006 a Broadview publication of She became the first edition to reproduce the Graphic serial text since 1887.

Narrative revisions

Haggard contended that romances such as She or King Solomon's Mines were best left unrevised, because "wine of this character loses its bouquet when it is poured from glass to glass." However, he made a number of significant alterations to the original Graphic version of She before its publication as a novel in 1887. One of the most significant was to the third chapter concerning the sherd, which was substantially expanded from the original to include the tale of Amenartas in uncial and cursive Greek scripts. Facsimile illustrations of an antique vase, made-up by Haggard's sister-in-law, Agnes Barber to resemble the sherd of Amenartas, were also included. A number of footnotes containing historical references from the narrator were also included. Haggard was keen to stress the historicity of the narrative, improving some of the information about geography and the history of ancient civilisations in chapters 4, 13, and 17.

The 1887 novel also featured a substantial rewrite of the "hotpot" scene in chapter eight, when the packman Mahomed is killed. In the original serialisation of She, the cannibal Amahagger grow restless and hungry and place a large heated pot over the head of Mahomed, enacting the hotpotting ritual before eating him. Haggard's stories were criticized at the time for their violence, and he toned down this scene for the novel publication. The revision removed entirely the hotpotting incident, with Mahomed dying instead when Holly shoots him accidentally in the scuffle with the Amahagger. Comparing the serial and novel editions of She, Stauffer describes the more compact narrative of the original as a reflection of the intense but short burst of creativity in which Haggard composed the story, arguing that "the style and grammar of the Graphic [edition] is more energetic and immediate", although as he noted, "sometimes more flawed".

Haggard continued to revise She for later publications, with the "New Edition" of 1888 containing over 400 minor alterations. The last revision by Haggard to be published was in 1896.

Fantasy and science fiction

She is one of the foundational works of fantasy literature
Fantasy literature
Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, literature has composed the majority of fantasy works. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music, painting, and other...

, coming around the time of The Princess and the Goblin
The Princess and the Goblin
The Princess and the Goblin is a children's fantasy novel by George MacDonald. It was published in 1872 by Strahan & Co.The sequel to this book is The Princess and Curdie....

(1858) by George MacDonald
George MacDonald
George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister.Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle. It was C.S...

, William Morris'
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

 The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World's End, and the short stories of Lord Dunsany. It is marked by a strong element of "the marvelous" in the figure of Ayesha, a two-thousand year-old sorceress, and the 'Spirit of the World', an undying fire that confers immortality. Indeed, Haggard's story is one of the first in modern literature to feature "a slight intrusion of something unreal" into a very real world - a hallmark of the fantasy genre. Similarly, the carefully constructed "fantasy history" of She foreshadows the use of this technique that characterises later fantasies such as The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...

 and The Wheel of Time
The Wheel of Time
The Wheel of Time is a series of epic fantasy novels written by American author James Oliver Rigney, Jr., under the pen name Robert Jordan. Originally planned as a six-book series, the length was increased by increments; at the time of Rigney's death, he expected it to be 12, but it will actually...

 series, and which imparts a "degree of security" to the secondary world. However, the story of She is firmly ensconced in what fantasy theorists call 'primary world reality', with the lost kingdom of Kôr, the realm ruled by the supernatural She, a fantastic "Tertiary World" at once directly part of and at the same time indirectly set apart from normative "primary" reality. Along with Haggard's prior novel, King Solomon's Mines, She laid the blueprints for the "Lost World
Lost World (genre)
The Lost World literary genre is a fantasy or science fiction genre that involves the discovery of a new world out of time, place, or both. It began as a subgenre of the late-Victorian imperial romance and remains popular to this day....

" sub-genre in fantasy literature, as well as the convention of the "lost race". As Brantlinger has noted of the novel's importance to the development of the "secondary world" in fantasy literature, "Haggard may seem peripheral to the development of science fiction, and yet his African quest romances could easily be transposed to other planets and galaxies". In his history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss notes the frequency with which Ayesha's death in the pillar of fire has been imitated by later science fiction and fantasy writers: "From Haggard on, crumbling women, priestesses, or empresses - all symbols of women as Untouchable and Unmakeable - fill the pages of many a scientific romance".

Adventure romance

She is part of the adventure subgenre
Adventure novel
The adventure novel is a genre of novels that has adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, as its main theme.-History:...

 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
Treasure Island
Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". First published as a book on May 23, 1883, it was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881–82 under the title Treasure Island; or, the...

(1883) and Prince Otto
Prince Otto
Prince Otto: A Romance is a novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1885.The novel was largely written during 1883. Stevenson referred to Prince Otto as "my hardest effort", one of the chapters was rewritten eight times by Stevenson and once by his wife.The Robert Louis...

(1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre 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
Tarzan
Tarzan is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani "great apes"; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer...

 novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...

 and recently Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, publication of which began in 1999. The series spans two six-issue limited series and a graphic novel from the America's Best Comics imprint of Wildstorm/DC, and a third miniseries...

(2000). In such fictional narratives the explorer is the hero, with the drama unfolding as they are cast into "the nostrum of the living past". Holly and Leo are prototypes of the adventurer, who has become a critical figure in modern fiction.

Imperial Gothic

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. 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". Novels like Dracula
Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...

and the 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:
She's threat to replace Queen Victoria with herself echoes the underlying anxiety over imperialism and European colonialism emblematic of the Imperial Gothic genre. Indeed, Judith Wilt characterises the narrative of She, in which British imperialist penetration of Africa (represented by Holly, Leo, and Job) suddenly suffers a potential "counter-attack" (from Ayesha), as one of the archetypal illustrations of the "reverse colonalism" motif in Victorian Gothic. Similarly, She marks one of the first fictional examples to raise the spectre of the natural decline of civilisation, and by extension, British imperial power, which would become an increasingly frequent theme in Gothic and invasion literature
Invasion literature
Invasion literature was a historical literary genre most notable between 1871 and the First World War . The genre first became recognizable starting in Britain in 1871 with The Battle of Dorking, a fictional account of an invasion of England by Germany...

 until the onset World War I.

Style

Rider Haggard's writing style was the source of much criticism 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
Waverley Novels
The Waverley Novels are a long series of books by Sir Walter Scott. For nearly a century they were among the most popular and widely-read novels in all of Europe. Because he did not publicly acknowledge authorship until 1827, they take their name from Waverley , which was the first...

, and the works of Defoe, Swift, Thackeray
Thackeray
Thackeray is the name of:*William Makepeace Thackeray, a novelist*Bal Thackeray, an Indian politician*Edward Talbot Thackeray, a recipient of the Victoria Cross*A David Thackeray, a South African astronomer...

, Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards...

, George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...

, and even Charles Reade
Charles Reade
Charles Reade was an English novelist and dramatist, best known for The Cloister and the Hearth.-Life:Charles Reade was born at Ipsden, Oxfordshire to John Reade and Anne Marie Scott-Waring; William Winwood Reade the influential historian , was his nephew. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford,...

 for the penny dreadful
Penny Dreadful
A penny dreadful was a type of British fiction publication in the 19th century that usually featured lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, each part costing an penny...

s of Mr Haggard"; adding, "The man who could write 'he spoke to She' can have no ear at all". A more common sentiment was expressed by the 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".

Modern literary criticism has tended to be more circumspect. As Victorian scholar Daniel Karlin has noted, "That Haggard's style is frequently bathetic or clumsy cannot be denied; but the matter is not so easily settled". Stauffer cites the passage where Holly is meditating as he tries to fall asleep as emblematic of "the charges against" Haggard's writing. In this scene, Holly lays down,
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". 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". 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
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

, Shakespeare, and Classical literature to imbue the story with a "Gothic sensibility". Yet as Stauffer notes, "Ultimately, however, one thinks of Haggard's plots, episodes, and images as the source of his lasting reputation and influence.

Imperialism

She is set firmly in the imperialist literature of the late-Victorian period. The so-called "New Imperialism
New Imperialism
New Imperialism refers to the colonial expansion adopted by Europe's powers and, later, Japan and the United States, during the 19th and early 20th centuries; expansion took place from the French conquest of Algeria until World War I: approximately 1830 to 1914...

" marking the last quarter of the 19th century witnessed a further expansion of British power, particularly on the African continent, and was characterised by a seemingly confident sentiment in the merits of empire and English civilisation. Thus She "invokes a particularly British view of the world" as Rider Haggard projects concepts of the English self against the foreign otherness of Africa. One such example occurs when Holly is first ushered into the presence of Ayesha, walking into the chamber behind a grovelling Billali who warns Holly to follow his example, or "a surety she will blast thee where thou standest". Holly hesitates, becoming scared: "my knees began to give way of their own mere motion; but reflection came to my aid. I was an Englishman, and why, I asked myself, should I creep into the presence of some savage woman as though I were a monkey". Indeed, She is preoccupied with stressing quintessential British qualities through the "adventure" of empire, usually in contrast to foreign barbarism. However, the notion of imperialism is further compounded by the figure of She, who is herself a foreign colonising force. "In a sense then", writes Stauffer, "a single property line divides the realm of Queen Victoria and that of She-who-must-be-obeyed, two white queens who rule dark-skinned natives of the African continent".

Race and evolution

Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Rider Haggard "proceeds on the assumption that whites are naturally superior to blacks, and that Britain's imperial extensions into Africa are a noble, civilising enterprise". Although Haggard penned a number of novels that portrayed Africans in a comparatively realistic light, She was not among their number. Even in King Solomon's Mines, the representation of Umbopa (who was based on an actual warrior) and the Kukuanas, drew upon Haggard's knowledge and understanding of the Zulus. In contrast, She makes no such distinctions. Ayesha, the English travellers, and the ancient inhabitants of Kôr are all white embodiments of civilisation, while the darker Amahagger, as a people, illustrate notions of savagery, barbarity, and superstition. Nonetheless, the "racial politics of the novel are more complex than they first appear", given that Ayesha is in origin an ancient Arabian, Leo is descended from, and physically resembles a blond Hellenistic Greek, while Holly is said to resemble a baboon in facial appearance - an animal Victorians typically associated with black Africans. Whilst critics like Wendy Katz, Patricia Murphy, and Susan Gubar have analysed the strong racist undercurrent in She, Andrew Stauffer has taken note of the qualifications through which "the novel suggests deeper connections among the races, an ancient genealogy of ethnicities and civilizations in which every character is a hybrid".

Indeed, there is a strong Darwinian
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....

 undercurrent framing the representation of race in She, stemming from Haggard's own interest in evolutionary theory and archaeological history. In particular the theme of racial degeneration is a prominent aspect in the novel. Moving into the fin de siècle, late-Victorians were increasingly concerned about cultural and national decline resulting from racial decay. In She, this evolutionary concept of degeneration is manifested in Ayesha and the Amahagger. Haggard represents the Amahagger as a debased mixture of ethnicities, "a curious mingling of races", originally descended from the inhabitants of Kôr but having intermarried with Arabs and Africans. Racial hybridisation of any kind "entailed degeneration" to Victorians, a "decline from the pure blood" of the initial races, and thus "an aspect of their degeneration is the idea that the Amahagger have lost whatever elements of civilization their Kôr ancestors may have imparted to them". Thus, Ayesha proudly proclaims her own racial purity as a quality to be admired: "for Arabian am I by birth, even 'al Arab al Ariba' (an Arab of the Arabs), and of the race of our father Yárab, the son of Khâtan[...] of the true Arab blood". However, the novel's starkest evocation of the evolutionary principle occurs in the regressive demise of Ayesha. Stepping into the pillar of fire, the immortal She begins to wither and decay, undergoing as death what Judith Wilt describes as the "ultimate Darwinian nightmare", evolution in reverse.

Female authority and sexuality

When Rider Haggard first conceived of She he began with the theme of "an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love". Although ostensibly a romance, the novel is part of the wider discourse regarding women and womanhood in late-Victorian Britain. Many scholars have noted how She was published as a book in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and Andrienne Munich argues that Haggard's story "could fittingly be considered an ominous literary monument to Victoria after fifty years of her reign". Indeed, in her devotion to Kallikrates (two thousand years after his death), Ayesha echoes the long-lasting fidelity of Victoria to her husband, Albert
Prince Albert
Prince Albert was the husband and consort of Queen Victoria.Prince Albert may also refer to:-Royalty:*Prince Albert Edward or Edward VII of the United Kingdom , son of Albert and Victoria...

. However, unlike the "benign" Victoria, the question of female authority is realised to the extreme in the figure of She-who-must-be-obeyed, whose autonomous will seemingly embodies Victorian anti-feminist fears of New Women desiring 'absolute personal independence coupled with supreme power over men'. Haggard constantly emphasises this anxiety over female authority in She, so that even the rationally minded and misogynistic Holly, who has put his "heart away from such vanity as woman's loveliness", ultimately falls upon his knees and worships Ayesha "as never woman was worshipped". Similarly, although the masculine and chivalric Leo is determined to reject Ayesha for killing the devoted native girl Ustane, he too quickly falls under her will. In fact, Ayesha's absolute command over the male sex is one of the most startling and unnerving aspects of the story.

In her role as the seductive femme fatale, Ayesha is part of "a long tradition of male fantasy that includes Homer's Circe
Circe
In Greek mythology, Circe is a minor goddess of magic , described in Homer's Odyssey as "The loveliest of all immortals", living on the island of Aeaea, famous for her part in the adventures of Odysseus.By most accounts, Circe was the daughter of Helios, the god of the sun, and Perse, an Oceanid...

, Shakespeare's Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony...

, and Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'". Brantlinger identifies the theme of "the white (or at least light-skinned) queen ruling a black or brown-skinned savage race" as "a powerfully erotic one" with its opposite being "the image of the helpless white woman captured by savages and threatened, at least, with rape". The figure of She both inspires male desire and dominates male sovereignty, represented in her conquest of the enlightened Victorians Holly and Leo. The two Englishmen embody the powers of manhood, with Leo a reflection of masculine physicality and Holly a representation of man's intellectual strength; but both are conquered by the feminine powers of She, who rules as much through sex-appeal as through sorcery, immortality, and will. Thus Steven Arata describes her as "the veiled woman, that ubiquitous nineteenth-century figure of male desire and anxiety, whose body is Truth but a Truth that blasts". Similarly, Sarah Gilbert sees the theme of feminine sexuality and authority realised in Ayesha as critical to the novel's success: "Unlike the women earlier Victorian writers had idealised or excoriated, She was neither an angel nor a monster. Rather, She was an odd but significant blend of the two types - an angelically chaste woman with monstrous powers, a monstrously passionate woman with angelic charms".

Reception

After its publication in 1887 She became an immediate success. According to The Literary World "Mr. Rider Haggard has made for himself a new field in fiction". Comparing the novel to King Solomon's Mines the review declared: "The book before us displays all the same qualities, and we anticipate for it a similar popularity. There is even more imagination in the later than in the earlier story; it contains scenes of greater sensuous beauty and also of more gruesome horror". The Public Opinion was equally rapturous in its praise:
The fantasy of She received particular acclaim from Victorian readers and critics. The review appearing in The Academy on the 15 January was impressed by the "grown-up" vision of the novel, declaring "the more impossible it gets the better Mr. Haggard does it... his astonishing imagination, and a certain vraisemblance ["verisimilitude" (French)] makes the most impossible adventures appear true". This sentiment was echoed in The Queen: The Lady's Newspaper, with the reviewer pronouncing that "this is a tale in the hands of a writer not so able as Mr. Haggard might easily have become absurd; but he has treated it with so much vividness and picturesque power as to invest it with unflagging interest, and given to the mystery a port of philosophic possibility that makes us quite willing to submit to the illusion.

The Spectator was more equivocal in its appraisal of She. The review described the narrative as "very stirring" and "exciting" and of "remarkable imaginative power", adding: "The ingenuity of the story... is as subtle as ever romancer invented, and from the day when Leo and Holly land on the coast of Africa, to the day when the pillar of fire is revealed to them by the all but immortal 'She who must be obeyed', the interest of the tale rises higher and higher with every new turn in its course". However, the review took issue with the characterisation of She and the manner of her demise: "To the present writer there is a sense of the ludicrous in the end of She that spoiled, instead of concluding with imaginative fitness, the thread of the impossible worked into the substance of this vivid and brilliantly told story". Haggard was moved to respond to the criticism of Ayesha's death, writing that "in the insolence of her strength and loveliness, she lifts herself up against the Omnipotent. Therefore, at the appointed time she is swept away by It... Vengeance, more heavy because more long delayed, strikes her in her proudest part - her beauty".

A number of reviews were more critical of Haggard's work. Although the reviewer of She in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine considered it better than King Solomon's Mines, he opined, "Mr. Rider Haggard has not proved as yet that he has anything that can be called imagination at all... It might be wrought up into an unparalleled stage effect: but it is rather a failure in pen and ink. The more fearful and wonderful such circumstances are intended to be, the more absurd is the failure of them". Even more scathing was Augustus Moore in the May edition of Time: A Monthly Miscellany, who declared: "In Mr haggard's book I find none of the powerful imagination, the elaborate detail, the vivid English which would entitle his work to be described as a romance... [rather] it seems to me to be the method of the modern melodrama". Moore was particularly dismissive of the novel's style and prose: "Mr Haggard cannot write English at all. I do not merely refer to his bad grammar, which a boy at a Boarding School would deserve to be birched for... It can only have been written by a man who not only knew nothing, but cared nothing for 'English undefiled'." Haggard's English was a common source of criticisms, but Moore was even dismissive of the character of She who widely garnered universal praise. "Ayesha", Moore declares, "is about as impressive as the singing chambermaid who represents the naughty fairy of a pantomime in tights and a tow wig". Concluding his review, Moore wondered at the success which had greeted She:
Despite such criticism, the reception that met She was overwhelmingly positive and echoed the sentiments expressed by anthropologist and literary critic Andrew Lang
Andrew Lang
Andrew Lang was a Scots poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.- Biography :Lang was born in Selkirk...

 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".

Feminist

Feminist literary historians
Feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in...

 have tended to define the figure of She as a literary manifestation of male alarm over the "learned and crusading new woman". In this view, Ayesha is a terrifying and dominant figure, a prominent and influential rendering of the misogynistic "fictive explorations of female authority" undertaken by male writers that ushered in literary modernism. Ann Ardis, for instance, views the fears Holly harbours over Ayesha's plan to return to England as being "exactly those voiced about the New Woman's entrance in the public arena". According to the feminist interpretation of the narrative, the death of She acts as a kind of teleological "judgement" of her transgression of Victorian gender boundaries, with Ardis likening it to a "witch-burning". However, to Rider Haggard, She was an investigation into love and immortality and the demise of Ayesha the moral end of this exploration:
Indeed, far from being a radical or threatening manifestation of womanhood, recent academics have noted the extent to which the character of She conforms to traditional conceptions of Victorian femininity; in particular her deferring devotion to Kallikrates/Leo, whom she swears wifely obedience to at the story's climax: "'Behold!' and she took his [Leo's] hand and placed it upon her shapely head, and then bent herself slowly down till one knee for an instant touched the ground - 'Behold! in token of submission do I bow me to my lord! Behold!' and she kissed him on the lips, 'in token of my wifely love do I kiss my lord'." Ayesha declares this to be the "first most holy hour of completed womanhood".

Legacy

She is one of the most influential novels in modern literature, with authors like Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...

, Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

 all acknowledging the importance of the work to their own and others writing. With over 83 million copies sold, the work is one of the biggest selling fictional titles of all time and has been translated into 44 languages. According to Stauffer, "She has always been Rider Haggard's most popular and influential novel, challenged only by King Solomon's Mines
King Solomon's Mines
King Solomon's Mines is a popular novel by the Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party...

in this regard". Such was the popularity and influence of the novel that it was cited in the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

 and Carl Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

, the latter describing the character of She as a manifestation of the anima figure.

The story is one of the most important texts of imaginative literature and had a lasting impact on the fantasy genre, directly giving rise to the 'lost civilisation' tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...

 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...

, and the creation of mythologised locations such as Shangri-la
Shangri-La
Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. Hilton describes Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains...

. Tolkien recognised the importance of She to his own fantasy works, especially in its foregrounding of a fictional history and narrative. The figure of She is also considered by many scholars to be a formative influence on Galadriel
Galadriel
Galadriel is a character created by J.R.R. Tolkien, appearing in his Middle-earth legendarium. She appears in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales....

 and other characters in Tolkien's Legendarium
Legendarium
Legendary may refer to:*A hagiography, or study of the lives of saints and other religious figures**The South English Legendary, a Middle English legendary*A legend-Entertainment:*Legendary, an album by Kaysha*Legendary...

, such as Shelob
Shelob
Shelob is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. She appears at the end of the fourth book, second volume , of The Lord of the Rings.-Literature:...

 (who is referred to as "She" and "Her" in the text). Indeed Haggard's characterisation of Ayesha became the prototype of the female antagonist in modern fantasy literature, most famously realised in the figure of the White Witch
White Witch
Jadis is the main antagonist of The Magician's Nephew and of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in C.S. Lewis' series, The Chronicles of Narnia...

, Jadis, from C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...

's The Chronicles of Narnia
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children by C. S. Lewis. It is considered a classic of children's literature and is the author's best-known work, having sold over 100 million copies in 47 languages...

.

Adaptations

She has been adapted for the cinema at least ten times, and was one of the earliest films to be made in 1899 as La Colonne de feu (The Pillar of Fire). A 1911 version starred Marguerite Snow
Marguerite Snow
Marguerite Snow was an American silent film actress. Her father was a comedian. She was educated in Denver, Colorado at the Loretta Heights Academy.-Silent Film Leading Lady:...

 and in 1917 Valeska Suratt appeared in a production for Fox which is lost
Lost film
A lost film is a feature film or short film that is no longer known to exist in studio archives, private collections or public archives such as the Library of Congress, where at least one copy of all American films are deposited and catalogued for copyright reasons...

. In 1925 a silent film of She
She (1925 film)
She is a 1925 British-German fantasy adventure film directed by Leander de Cordova and G.B. Samuelson and starring Betty Blythe, Carlyle Blackwell, Mary Odette. It was filmed in Berlin as a co-production, and based on H. Rider Haggard's novel of the same name.The book has been a popular subject for...

was produced with the active participation of Rider Haggard and starring Betty Blythe
Betty Blythe
Betty Blythe was an American actress best known for her dramatic roles in exotic silent films such as The Queen of Sheba .-Career:...

. A decade later another cinematic version of the novel was released, featuring Helen Gahagan
Helen Gahagan
Helen Gahagan was an American actress and politician. She was the third woman and first Democratic woman elected to Congress from California; her election made California one of the first two states to have elected female members of the House from both parties.-Early life and acting...

, Randolph Scott
Randolph Scott
Randolph Scott was an American film actor whose career spanned from 1928 to 1962. As a leading man for all but the first three years of his cinematic career, Scott appeared in a variety of genres, including social dramas, crime dramas, comedies, musicals , adventure tales, war films, and even a few...

 and Nigel Bruce
Nigel Bruce
William Nigel Ernle Bruce , best known as Nigel Bruce, was a British character actor on stage and screen. He was best known for his portrayal of Doctor Watson in a series of films and in the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes...

. This 1935 adaptation
She (1935 film)
She is a 1935 film produced by Merian C. Cooper. The film is based on H. Rider Haggard's novel of the same name. It stars Helen Gahagan, Randolph Scott and Nigel Bruce, with music by Max Steiner...

 was set in the Arctic, rather than Africa, and depicts the ancient civilisation of the story in an Art Deco
Art Deco
Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 style, with music by Max Steiner
Max Steiner
Max Steiner was an Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as...

. The 1965 film She
She (1965 film)
She is a 1965 film made by Hammer Film Productions, based on the novel by H. Rider Haggard. It was directed by Robert Day and stars Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.-Plot synopsis:...

 was produced by Hammer Film Productions
Hammer Film Productions
Hammer Film Productions is a film production company based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1934, the company is best known for a series of Gothic "Hammer Horror" films made from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers, film noir and comedies and in later...

 and starred Ursula Andress
Ursula Andress
Ursula Andress is a Swiss actress and a sex symbol of the 1960s. She is known for her roles as Bond girl Honey Ryder in Dr...

 as Ayesha and John Richardson
John Richardson (actor)
John Richardson is an English actor, who appeared in movies from the 1950s until the 1990s.He appeared in many Italian films, including Mario Bava's Black Sunday...

 as her reincarnated love, with Peter Cushing
Peter Cushing
Peter Wilton Cushing, OBE was an English actor, known for his many appearances in Hammer Films, in which he played the handsome but sinister scientist Baron Frankenstein and the vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing, amongst many other roles, often appearing opposite Christopher Lee, and occasionally...

 and Bernard Cribbins
Bernard Cribbins
Bernard Cribbins, OBE is an English character actor, voice-over artist and musical comedian with a career spanning over half a century who came to prominence in films in the 1960s, has been in work consistently since his professional debut in the mid 1950s, and as of 2010 is still an active...

 as other members of the expedition.
In 2001 another adaption was released direct-to-video with Ian Duncan as Leo Vincey, Ophélie Winter
Ophélie Winter
Ophélie Kleerekoper-Winter is a French singer and actress.- Biography :Her father David Alexandre Winter, was a Dutch pop singer during the 1970s, while her mother was a French fashion model, who is now her agent...

as Ayesha and Marie Bäumer as Roxane.

External links

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