(She) Elle

The first of a trilogy named Ayesha, after the white queen of a Central African tribe, She is, alongside King Solomon’s Mines, Henry Rider Haggard’s masterpiece.

In the year of its publication, buoyed by its success, the author abandoned his career as a lawyer to devote himself to literature. He then traveled across nearly every continent, publishing an unequaled quantity of adventure novels for the period, and became a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, to whom he confessed in 1912 that it had taken him six weeks to write the novel. The basic idea was simple: that of “a woman who has discovered the secret of longevity.”

She (She-who-must-be-obeyed) recounts the journey to Africa of a Cambridge professor, Horace Holly, and his adopted son, Leo. There they encounter Queen Ayesha, who made herself immortal by bathing in a pillar of fire that is the source of life. Of exceptional beauty, she embodies the all-powerful woman, a source of both desire and dread. The travelers discover that Ayesha has waited two thousand years for the reincarnation of her lover Kallikrates, whom she killed in a fit of jealousy: the queen believes she sees in Leo the reincarnation of this rejected lover.

The novel achieved immense success; Ayesha would be cited several times by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams and held up by Carl Gustav Jung as the female archetype par excellence. With 83 million copies sold in 44 languages, it is a major work of English-language literature, adapted for the screen ten times, seven of them during the author’s lifetime (he died in 1925). The first adaptation, as early as 1899, was the work of Georges Méliès. Ursula Andress gave what is said to be an unforgettable performance as Queen Ayesha in Robert Day’s 1965 version.

A fine copy, as published.