Interpretations of Haggard as a chronicler of male angst have tended to obscure other, equally complex, aspects of his fictional writing, notably his treatment of the position of women and of the marriage question in his novels of English domestic life. His most sustained consideration of these subjects is to be found in Jess (1887) and Beatrice (1890), two novels in which Haggard's primary focus is on the strong sexual responses of two independently minded and highly spiritual young women to men who are already committed to other women. While they self-consciously genuflect towards the concept of the New Woman they have a limited amount in common with the contemporaneous and popular New Woman novels. The themes with which they deal, primarily the impact of female sexuality upon men and female self-sacrifice, are essentially a development of the themes of Haggard's earlier novels and continue to reflect significant personal experiences.

Jess and Its Biographical Resonances

Unlike Haggard's other novels, Jess is set entirely outside England, in an African context more typical of his romances. The book has a simple, unified plot and turns on the sexual passions of the four principal characters: Jess; Bessie, her sister; Muller, who desires Bessie; and John, whom Jess loves and who falls in love with her while engaged to Bessie. The focus is on the moral quandary of Jess and John, and on the intense spirituality and overwhelming sexual potency of Jess and her remarkable capacity for self-sacrifice in order to protect her sister. Her altruism is adumbrated by the depiction of the brutal Muller. Both Jess and Muller are highly sexually driven, and both are capable of extreme violence, but morally they are polar opposites. Contemporary critics were divided about the success of the character of Jess. The Pall Mall Gazette concluded that Haggard was not ‘at home’ in ‘giving a psychological study of female character’, while the Athenaeum applauded his ‘study of a strange and fascinating being’. Haggard commenced Jess in the late autumn of 1885 and completed it at the end of December of the same year. One month later he began work on She (1887),4 published two months before Jess.