H. Rider Haggard
1856–1925
Biography
Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was an English novelist who also worked as a colonial official and, later, as a writer on rural affairs. He was born in Norfolk and spent several years in southern Africa in the 1870s and early 1880s, first in government service and then farming. That experience gave his fiction its settings and much of its view of the empire. Back in England he began writing adventure novels that made him one of the most popular storytellers of his day.
His breakthrough was King Solomon's Mines (1885), a tale of a hidden African land and a search for a lost treasure, narrated by the hunter Allan Quatermain, who returned in many later novels. She (1887), with its lost kingdom ruled by an immortal queen, became his other great success. Together these books helped establish the lost-world adventure as a popular form in English fiction. Their racial assumptions are a serious problem for modern readers, and they are best read with that in mind. They are still studied as examples of imperial romance.
On this site, King Solomon's Mines is in English, and As Minas de Salomão is a Portuguese edition whose catalogue entry credits Eça de Queirós as translator. Haggard's later work turned to farming, land settlement and rural life in England, a side of his output that is less often read now.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
As Minas de Salomão
by H. Rider Haggard (translated by Eça de Queirós)
Eça de Queirós's Portuguese version of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. The hunter Allan Quatermain agrees to guide Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good into the African interior in search of Sir Henry's lost brother, following an old map towards a legendary treasure. This…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.King Solomon's Mines
by H. Rider Haggard
King Solomon's Mines is an 1885 popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist H. Rider Haggard. Published by Cassell and Company, it tells of an expedition through an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain, searching…
Summary from Wikipedia: King Solomon's Mines (CC BY-SA 4.0)