Criticism of Rider Haggard's fiction has traditionally tended to focus heavily upon his early romances published between 1885 and 1892, especially King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887) and, at least in recent years, to centre on their political and psychological resonances. In the last twenty years, very few books dedicated solely to Haggard have been produced, criticism of his work being vested mainly in chapters in wider books and in journal articles. Commentators, including Sigmund Freud, have recognized the psychosexual aspects of some of the earlier romances and have observed particularly that She derives in part from its author's personal emotional geography. Wendy Katz has proposed that Haggard's works ‘are in fact a giant repository of his own attitudes’. These convincing readings of a pervasive but, at least sometimes, unconscious outworking of personal issues, often sexual ones, in the plots, settings and imagery of some of Haggard's romances are well argued. However, there has been no detailed exploration of the more obvious, and plainly conscious, treatment in virtually all his novels of emotional and sexual relationships that have their origin in his own experiences – and the connection in this respect between Haggard's novels and his romances.

While Haggard himself makes no direct reference to any link between his personal experiences and his fiction, he does acknowledge that his most familiar romance hero Allan Quatermain is ‘only myself set in a variety of imagined situations, thinking my thoughts and looking at life through my eyes’. And, in a passage in She, Haggard makes some significant observations on the relationship between the imagination, or fiction, and fact. The explorer Holly has just described seeing the tomb of two young lovers, with its carved epitaph, ‘Wedded in Death’, and has imagined for them a background suggestive of that of Haggard and his first love, Lilly Jackson. Haggard continues: