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
- 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
Ten of Haggard's eleven novels consider the impact of potentially destructive sexual and emotional urges, primarily upon the male. Haggard expresses these urges in terms of a conscious but wholly irresistible psychological imperative, a fundamental part of human existence, offering the possibility of ultimate happiness but capable also of causing emotional chaos and sometimes accompanied by an unshakeable undertow of guilt. These ten novels also consider related aspects of the same subject, including the divine, spiritual and elevating qualities of genuine love, the validity of sexual union outside the marriage contract, the possibility of a renunciation of the sexual aspects of love in favour of the spiritual and the reunion of lovers in an afterlife. It is not Haggard's novels alone that maintain a constant focus on these themes. They feature in all but two of his fortyfour full-length romances. As a measure of this concentration, five out of the ten novels that deal with the sexual imperative have women's names as their respective titles (and Haggard originally entitled his first novel Angela until it was discovered that the title had been used previously), and twenty-three of his romances have as their titles either a woman's name or a sobriquet. This focus on women occurs from the very start of Haggard's romance writing, despite his reference to his intention in writing King Solomon's Mines to produce ‘a book for boys’, and the claim of the book by its narrator, Allan Quatermain, that ‘there is no woman in it – except Foulata’. In reality both Foulata, the faithful native lover of one of the explorers, and the evil witch Gagool, are central to the action and can be seen as representing the duality of woman. Haggard sheds a little light on this concentration in an article he wrote about his first book, Dawn (1884), in The Idler in 1893. Of Angela, the book's heroine, he writes: ‘before I had done with her, I became so deeply attached to my heroine that, in a literary sense, I have never quite got over it’. Later in the same article he proposes that ‘women are so much easier and more interesting to write about, for whereas no two of them are alike, in modern men […] there is a paralysing sameness’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2018