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Zusatztext “A strange book . . . full of hidden meaning.” — Sigmund Freud Informationen zum Autor H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925) worked in South Africa during the time of Britian's war with the Zulus and the First Boer War. He turned these experiences into fiction on his return to England and achieved popular and critical acclaim with KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885), ALLAN QUATERMAIN (1887) and SHE (1887). Patrick Brantlinger is Professor of English at Indiana University, Illinois. He has published work on British literature and imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Klappentext A classic Victorian adventure into the realm of the unknown "She" is Ayesha, the mysterious white queen of a Central African Tribe and the goal of three English gentlemen, who must face shipwreck, fever, and cannibals in their quest to find her hidden realm. First published in 1887, She has enthralled the imaginations of many-from Freud, who prescribed the book to one of his patients, to the generations of readers, who remain fascinated by the book's revealing and fantastic representations of dangerous women, adventuring men, and unexplored Africa. Available for the first time from Penguin Classics, edited by Patrick Brantlinger, this edition of one of the most famous works of popular literature includes a critical introduction, suggestions for further reading, and explanatory notes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. My Visitor There are some events of which each circumstance and surrounding detail seem to be graven on the memory in such fashion that we cannot forget them. So it is with the scene that I am about to describe; it rises as clearly before my mind at this moment as though it had happened yesterday. It was in this very month something over twenty years ago that I, Ludwig Horace Holly, sat one night in my rooms at Cambridge, grinding away at some mathematical work, I forget what. I was to go up for my fellowship within a week, and was expected by my tutor and my college generally to distinguish myself. At last, wearied out, I flung my book down, and, walking to the mantelpiece, took up a pipe and filled it. There was a candle burning on this mantelpiece, and a long, narrow glass at the back of it; and as I was in the act of lighting the pipe I caught sight of my own countenance in the glass, and paused to reflect. The lighted match burnt away till it scorched my fingers, forcing me to drop it; but still I stood and stared at myself in the glass, and reflected. “Well,” I said aloud, at last, “it is to be hoped that I shall be able to do something with the inside of my head, for I shall certainly never do anything by the help of the outside.” This remark will doubtless strike anybody who reads it as being slightly obscure, but in fact I was alluding to my physical deficiencies. Most men of twenty-two are endowed with some share, at any rate, of the comeliness of youth, but to me even this was denied. Short, thick-set, and deep-chested almost to deformity, with long sinewy arms, heavy features, hollow grey eyes, a low brow half overgrown with a mop of thick black hair, like a deserted clearing on which the forest had once more begun to encroach; such was my appearance nearly a quarter of a century ago, and such, with some modification, is it to this day. Like Cain, I was branded—branded by Nature with the stamp of abnormal ugliness, as I was gifted by Nature...
