She

On his friend's deathbed, the Cambridge scholar Horace Holly accepts a strange charge: to raise the infant Leo Vincey and one day set him on the trail of an ancient family legend, recorded on a fragment of pottery two thousand years old. The legend tells of a Greek ancestor murdered in the African interior by an immortal white queen who had loved him and whom he had refused.

When Leo comes of age, he and Holly journey into a marsh-bound region of east Africa and find the lost kingdom of Kôr: the ruins of a vanished people, and beneath them a woman of terrible beauty who veils herself from all eyes. She is Ayesha — She-who-must-be-obeyed — deathless and unchanged, who for two thousand years has waited in the heart of the mountain for the return of the lover she killed. In Leo Vincey she believes she sees him reborn.

Told through the eyes of the ugly, learned Holly, who believes himself immune to her and is not, She moves with the pace of the great lost-world adventures Haggard had just invented, from the found manuscript and the shipwreck to the savage Amahagger and the Place of Life itself, where the secret of Ayesha's deathlessness waits in a pillar of rolling flame.

First published in 1887, She became one of the best-selling novels ever written and created the archetype of the immortal femme fatale — the figure Carl Jung read as a model of the “anima.” It is also a document of the Victorian empire, carrying the colonial gaze and gender attitudes of its age; read here for the great romance it has always been, and seen clearly for what it was.