Girl, 2000

She

H. Rider Haggard

A lowbrow classic, She is a book for schoolboys of all ages from twelve to... well, two thousand, I suppose. I can’t imagine any woman of any age ever wanting to read it, but despite this apparent handicap, Rider Haggard’s famous adventure story is one of the most popular novels ever written, with over 100 million copies sold. It’s a specimen – perhaps the specimen – of what used to be called a Rattling Good Yarn, and oozing, too, with that all-important Sex Interest, which Haggard ladles on in part-sublimated Pre-Raphaelite dollops (you know the kind of thing – the Blessed Damozel leaning bosomily over the Bar of Heaven, Waterhouse’s Lamia with one tit frankly out, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth). It must have caused unnumbered nocturnal emissions, voluntary and involuntary, in the public-school dormitories of its day.

    Indeed, the formula has been more than good enough to keep us reading for well over a century, for though Haggard’s titillatory efforts seem merely funny today, the central character herself has an erotic power that cannot be denied. Jung held that Ayesha, the eponymous She, was one of the purest depictions of the anima in literature: a woman as near immortal as dammit and so appallingly beautiful that a single glimpse of her face is enough to enslave you and destroy your sanity, yet whose favour is also the key to untold wisdom, riches and power if only you can win it. 

    Everyone knows the story, or at least the outline of it. Since its first serialization in the Graphic, an English popular magazine of the era, it has appeared in multitudinous guises from feature film to comic strip to BBC radio drama, and inspired countless imitations (Indiana Jones is a descendant). To tell the truth, though, I didn’t find Ayesha nearly as eldritch or as archetypal as advertised; in fact I found myself liking her better and better as the story went on. She’s a girl of sturdy and loyal character, even if she doesn’t think twice about torturing deserving cases in her catacombs or giving love-rivals the kind of drop-dead look that actually works. 

    I wish I’d read She when I could have appreciated it properly – before, that is, age, experience and the countless other books I’ve read spoilt the innocent pleasure I might have taken in it at, say, age fourteen. I still enjoyed it well enough, though I had to skip through a few over-amped passages of description here and there, and put up with the fictional narrator’s half-baked amateur philosophizing. There’s a surprising amount of purple in Rider Haggard’s passages, some of it arguably fatal to the tension or excitement he is trying to build up; much of this occurs around the middle of the book and looks suspiciously like padding. Perhaps the author was simply trying to meet his contracted word-count-per-episode for the Graphic.

    Apart from a short but evocative nautical episode near the beginning, the writing only really comes to life after Ayesha enters the story – halfway through the book, in the middle of a lot of cod-philosophy about people growing more cynical as they get older, and suchlike. The later chapters, in which she transforms from villainess to heroine, are by far the best of the book, full of genuinely exciting scenes and images.
    She is the kind of novel that excites the contempt of intellectuals, and the long-outworn familiarity of its tropes – a product, lest we forget, of its own vast success – obviously works against it as far as the present-day reader is concerned, but it remains a pretty good read for all that. Ayesha may not truly have been immortal in the flesh, but as a literary creation – and a manifestation of the collective unconscious – she will never die.