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:

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.’