page_title: H. Rider Haggard
section_title: Reputation and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: H. Rider Haggard / Reputation and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: A cartoon of Henry Rider Haggard, author of adventure novels, created by Leslie Ward and signed with his pseudonym, 'Spy' on the lower left hand side. The drawing is dated (May 21 1887) in the upper right corner. In the upper left corner is 'Vanity Fair' as it was commissioned for the British magazine which was published from 1868 to 1914. At the bottom it says, "She," which is the title of a novel written by Rider Haggard that waa published in 1887.
context_page_description: Sir Henry Rider Haggard KBE was an English writer of adventure fiction set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the lost world literary genre. He was also involved in agricultural reform throughout the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential.
context_section_description: Haggard's stories are still widely read today. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung considered Ayesha, the female protagonist of She, to be a manifestation of the anima. Her epithet "She Who Must Be Obeyed" is used by British author John Mortimer in his Rumpole of the Bailey series as the private name which the lead character uses for his wife, Hilda, before whom he trembles at home (despite the fact that he is a barrister with some skill in court). Haggard's Lost World genre influenced popular American pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy, Philip José Farmer, and Abraham Merritt. Allan Quatermain, the adventure hero of King Solomon's Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain, was a template for the American character Indiana Jones. Quatermain has gained recent popularity thanks to being a main character in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
  Graham Greene, in an essay about Haggard, stated, "Enchantment is just what this writer exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty years have been unable to wear away." Haggard was praised in 1965 by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill and sheer imaginative power" and a co-originator with Robert Louis Stevenson of the Age of the Story Tellers.
  The first chapter of Haggard's book People of the Mist is credited with inspiring the motto of the Royal Air Force (formerly the Royal Flying Corps), Per ardua ad astra.
  Rider Haggard has been widely criticised for perpetuating negative stereotypes about non-Europeans. For instance, in his canonical book Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o refers to Haggard as one of the "geniuses of racism." The Kenyan author and academic Micere Mugo wrote in 1973 that reading the description of "an old African woman in Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines had for a long time made her feel mortal terror whenever she encountered old African women."
  In 1925, his daughter Lilias commissioned a memorial window for Ditchingham Church, in his honour, from James Powell and Sons. The design features the Pyramids, his farm in Africa, and Bungay as seen from the Vineyard Hills near his home.
caption: Vanity Fair, 1887
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