Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Sexual Imperative
- 2 The Origins of Haggard's Fictional Writing
- 3 The Early Novels (1884–95): Youthful Anger
- 4 The New Woman, Female Self-Sacrifice and Spirituality (1887–1901)
- 5 Spiritual Love and Sexual Renunciation (1899–1908)
- 6 The Final Fiction: Spiritual Consolation and the Dictates of the Sexual Imperative (1909–30)
- 7 Summation: A Personal Odyssey
- Appendix: Plot Summaries
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Spiritual Love and Sexual Renunciation (1899–1908)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Sexual Imperative
- 2 The Origins of Haggard's Fictional Writing
- 3 The Early Novels (1884–95): Youthful Anger
- 4 The New Woman, Female Self-Sacrifice and Spirituality (1887–1901)
- 5 Spiritual Love and Sexual Renunciation (1899–1908)
- 6 The Final Fiction: Spiritual Consolation and the Dictates of the Sexual Imperative (1909–30)
- 7 Summation: A Personal Odyssey
- Appendix: Plot Summaries
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the period that begins with the publication of Swallow (1899) and ends with that of The Ghost Kings (1908) Haggard gives consideration for the first time in his fiction to a love that is predominantly spiritual rather than sexual and, most strikingly of all, to the delicate subject of sexual renunciation. His most concentrated focus is found in his novels Stella Fregelius (1904) and The Way of the Spirit (1906). While both of these books closely examine the merits of a spiritual love that is largely divorced from sexual love, they both ultimately recognize, albeit with different degrees of conviction, that the sexual imperative is an integral and inescapable part of the human condition and postulate that while earthly sexual renunciation may sometimes be necessary, it demands a price from those who adopt it and derives any validity it has from the prospect of an eventual reunion in an afterlife that will have a pronounced sexual as well as a spiritual dimension.
Haggard's Contemporary Biography
In the 19 years from 1889 to 1908 Haggard suffered bereavements and emotional trials, involving family and close friends, that affected him deeply. In December 1899 his mother died. Lilias observes of Haggard's feelings for his mother that he ‘loved her so greatly, in one sense above all other women’. Haggard himself provides an insight into what her death meant to him and how often, in his later life, he recalled her, in a passage in his autobiography:
She seems to be much nearer to me now that she is dead […] It is as though our intimacy and mutual understanding has grown in a way as real as it is mysterious. No night goes by that I do not think of her and pray that we may meet again to part no more.
In February 1891, while Haggard and his wife were in Mexico, they received the news that their only son Jock had died in England at the age of ten. Haggard, fond of all of his children, was particularly attached to his son. As his daughter remarks ‘this child he worshipped with all the passion of his over-intense nature’. Of the immediate impact, he records in his autobiography: ‘I descended into hell.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2018