She (Oxford World's Classics)
Ayesha is She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, a 2,000-year-old queen who rules a fabled lost city deep in a maze of African caverns. She has the occult wisdom of Isis, the eternal youth and beauty of Aphrodite, and the violent appetite of a lamia. Like A. Conan Doyle'sLost World,Sheis one of those magnificent Victorian yarns about an expedition to a far-off locale shadowed by magic, mystery, and death.Tim Stout writes, inHorror: 100 Best Books, "As the plot  takes hold one has the fancy that [Ayesha] had always existed, in  some dark dimension of the imagination, and that [H. Rider] Haggard  was the fortunate author to whom she chose to reveal herself." Haggard did, in fact, write this book in a six-week burst of feverish  inspiration: "It came faster than my poor aching hand could set it  down," he later said.This edition of the 1887 classic features an introductory essay by  literary critic Regina Barreca, who likens Ayesha to Flaubert's  Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--"literally fantastic female  figures who must be stopped before they love again."--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.