The International Walter Pater Society has announced Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism No. 4, which was due to be published November 2019…
The issue includes a cluster of articles on ‘Decadence and the Weird’, guest edited by Dustin Friedman and Neil Hultgren. Friedman questions gay identity in Teleny. Hultgren turns to proto-modernist form in Arthur Machen’s prose. Jessica Straley traces the threat and promise of anthropomorphized flora as depicted in Algernon Blackwood’s stories. Molly Youngkin argues that the women populating Rider Haggard’s tales inspired the later weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
On Haggard, Lovecraft did at least try to dip into the famous author but may have succeeded only in reading She. He wrote to Kleiner in early February 1920 that…
Cook has also been kind, outlining a reading course in Haggard. I shall not tackle the gentleman in question till I am through with Algernon Blackwood, whose rather mediocre fantasies I am absorbing one after another. When I do read She, I will report my critical impressions in detail.
However, it appears he did not go on to assemble and then peruse Cook’s course. Since Joshi notes that Haggard’s most famous work was left unread for many years…
HPL did not read the novel [She] until 1926, and obtained his personal copy of the book still later.
Specifically he had to read She, probably at some speed and along with many others, to prepare his Supernatural Literature survey essay. A letter to Derleth, 31st October 1926, further illuminates…
I’ve recently begun reading the work of Sir H. Rider Haggard for the first time. ‘She’ is very good, & if the others are at all commensurate, I have quite a treat ahead”.
Yet, with the resources available to me, I can find no evidence that he read anything of Haggard other than She. Certainly Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library lists only She, thus I assume there is no other evidence of Haggard to be found anywhere else in Lovecraft’s letters. If Lovecraft had read some of Haggard’s other books, one would have thought he would have mentioned them to at least one correspondent.
But if he did read some after She, what might they have been?
Obvious candidates are the She sequel Ayesha, the Return of She; and the well-known adventure King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain. The vivid Ancient Egyptian settings of Morning Star and (in part) The Wanderer’s Necklace might have appealed, and their publication dates would have put them on Cook’s 1920 “reading course”. The other possibility that Cook would surely have noted is Doctor Therne (1898), a ‘tormented scientist’ confessional about a plague that sweeps England. It might have been hard to obtain by circa 1926, but Cook was reputed to have a vast library until 1930 and would probably have lent it. It may interest some to know that Therne is told from Dunchester, a name which evokes the similar-sounding Dunwich.
