Dawn, The Witch's Head, Colonel Quaritch V. C. and Joan Haste are the most transparently angry of Haggard's early novels. They also abound in transparent biographical resonances. The anger is levelled at the emotional disruption that women, virtuous and benign as well as malign and seductive, can cause to a young man, and at the outcomes of the sexual imperative expressed in terms of sexual jealousy, moral disintegration and violence. This anger is intensified by the proposal that marriage has few positives to offer, and it is scarcely modulated by suggestions of the merits of spiritual love or by the prospect of the continuation and culmination of passionate love in an afterlife. It is a demonstrably, and notably, personal statement by Haggard. In exploring this theme in these four early novels, which focus intensely upon the sexual imperative, he draws freely upon the tropes associated with the sensation novel. Defining perhaps the best-known of these, Lyn Pykett makes reference to ‘the popular sensation novel of the 1860s, with its bigamous or adulterous heroines and complicated plots of crime and intrigue’. The violence associated with the genre gives an appropriate frame to Haggard's visceral anger. Inter alia, this chapter notes the sensation echoes in the four novels in question but concludes that Haggard's end result was significantly different to that of the sensation novels of the 1860s. The anger and intensity of Haggard's early novels also informs his contemporary romances. But sexually inspired male anger is not left entirely unchallenged as their sum total. There is also a sense, which Haggard develops and amplifies in his later works, that the sexual imperative and the emotional turbulence it is capable of causing are inevitable parts of the human predicament.

Haggard's Contemporary Biographical Experiences

Haggard completed Dawn, his first work of fiction, in 1883. The preceding five years had been a time of concentrated emotional turmoil for him. He had been jilted by his first love. He had subsequently involved himself in an affair with a married woman who became pregnant with his child, who subsequently died. He had hastily married a woman he respected but probably never truly loved.