She (Haggard, 1887)

H. Rider Haggard. She. Pub. 1887. Oxford World's Classics.

• 1 "at a certain University, which for the purposes of this history we will call Cambridge" -- cheeky (wryn humor -- on 18 the illegibility of Vincey's will means it was drawn up according to the strictest legal principles)
• 4 "presenting to the world the most wonderful history, as distinguished from romance, that it's records can show" -- disavowing its genre to accentuate it
• 5 note about compensation should publishing fail
• "editor" positioning readers interpretation
• 8 "monkey theory" -- Holly a physical link to Charles Darwin, blurring the species line
• 10 "that is, so far as families can be traced" -- Vesey and a link beyond conventionally imagined inheritance and genealogical model of history (as well as generic, not like Waverley's descent)
• 14 echoes of hamlet
• 17 some sort of association btwn lawyers and blue paper? The blue books in Bleak House (Dickens, 1852) for ex
• 21 Leo takes on a butcher's boy as in David Copperfield (Dickens, 1849)
• 25-6 wonderful description of the archival time capsule of the pot shard (sherd?) with scrolls and various scripts and vegetable paper matter
• 36-7 wonderful way the idea of revenge is embedded in an English name, Vincey -- this whole thing an elaborate philological fantasy
• 41 variant Shakespeare hamlet text "from 1740 acting edition" - l/u
• the shipwreck in ch 4 is bracing
• 62 "perhaps the people were not always savage" -- potential analogy between past race and late c19 fears of degeneration
• 81 Ustane kissing Leo -- the Amahagger are matriarchal and have no marriage, isn't there something similar in Butler's Erewhon?
• 82 "morality is a matter of latitude"
• 99-100 markedly extreme depiction of violence for a Victorian novel (note says it was modified in the Graphic [ha])
• 112 "this cold fragment of mortality” (Billali’s dead woman’s foot)— the way history and the human form are fragmented into partly obscure indications of deep-time narratives
• preservation, too, dramatized by Billali and Leo’s father
• 117-8 nature of "full knowledge" and truth too much for man to bear— metaphysical reverie (kind of overheated), also involving fragments
• 129 coming near the mountain of Kor seeing "the mouth of a dark tunnel that forcibly reminded me of those undertaken by our C19 engineers in the construction of railway lines."— turning the teleological quintessential image of industrial modernity cyclical
• 132 Holly thinks the writing on the cave walls in Kor looks more like Chinese than ancient or modern classical/middle eastern languages
• 142 Ayesha ghost-like, as if in a burial shroud on first meeting
• 142 "my memories are in a grave that mine own hands hollowed"
• 148-9 her civilization-spanning past makes her something of an embodied form of the philological quest for "the key to all mythologies," as Casaubon called it: the physical embodiment of the epistemological and sexual desires underlying the adventure story— creating a new synthesis of desire
  • xvi intro mentions contemporary reviewers saying holly isn't authentically intellectual but I think the above makes an argument for how bound up the intellectual is with desire
• 149 Ayesha = "Assha" according to note
• 150 super post-Lyell and Darwin: "What are ten or twenty or fifty thousand years in the history of life?"
• 152 her visionary pool "is no magic; that is a fiction of ignorance."
• 175 Ayesha justifying torturing her people: "How thinkest thou I rule this people?... It is by terror. Mine is an empire of the imagination."
• 177ff the caves, deep time, and again the closeness of the antiquarian and the adventurous