The distance between Haggard's two final novels, Love Eternal (1918) and Mary of Marion Isle (1929), illustrates a distinct sea change in his fictional writing. While the former, driven by contemporary events, constitutes a reversion to a consideration of the merits of aspects of spiritualism, the latter offers a reflection, albeit a cautious and conservative one, of the literary modernity apparent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Haggard's fiction published in the period 1909 to 1930 falls in fact into three distinct categories. The romances published between 1909 and 1914, turning away from a consideration of the virtues of a love that is predominantly spiritual, as exemplified by Stella Fregelius (1904) and The Way of the Spirit (1906), and by romances such as Swallow (1899) and The Ghost Kings (1908), depict strong, powerful, sexually predatory but sexually vulnerable women who, unlike their counterparts in Haggard's earlier fiction, such as Ayesha and Cleopatra, fail to entrap the male protagonists. These books continue to propose that the sexual nexus has the capacity to disrupt lives but also present a male capability to resist sexual temptation, either when a genuine love is available or when the male is emotionally mature. The fiction published in the period 1917 to 1921 and influenced by the Great War, while continuing to acknowledge the often-damaging consequences of sexual passion, is self-consciously tentative about representing such passion, emphasizing instead the consolatory aspects of liaisons that are predominantly spiritual and, above all, is unswervingly insistent upon an afterlife in which earthly lovers are reunited. There is, however, a strong underlying recognition that sex plays a valid and inevitable role in relations between men and women. The books published between 1921 and 1930 reaffirm the overwhelming nature of sexual passion and illustrate the inescapable imperatives of the human situation, representing and celebrating the triumph of true passionate love between men and women over the hollow and emotionally disabling moral caveats of society and asking difficult questions about marriage and the representatives of the established church.