Decorated initial H

aggard’s personal obsession with this theme of the sexual betrayal, by a man, of his first love is further underlined by his treatment of it in Montezuma’s Daughter and The People of the Mist (1894), written shortly after the death of his son in 1891. Haggard was devastated by his loss and interpreted it as a punishment for his own sexual incontinence. He found himself unable to work for some months and, when he did, it seems clear that once again self- consolation was a psychological imperative. InMontezuma’s Daughter and The People of the Mist the male protagonists, respectively Thomas and Leonard, having sworn eternal fidelity to their first loves, go abroad to a far-flung land where they fall in love with, and marry, exotic native women. Eventually they return to England: Thomas because his native wife has conveniently died; Leonard, bringing his wife Juanna, to discover that his first love has also, equally conveniently, died. Thomas’s first love, Lily, who has remained faithful to him, forgives him for breaking their oath, and they marry. Leonard’s first love had married someone else but never forgot her love for him, leaving him considerable property upon which he lives happily with Juanna. In both books first love triumphs and the man is exonerated for his sexual infi delity, very determinedly so in Montezuma’s Daughter. [62]

Related material

Bibliography

Reeve, Richard. The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard. London and New York: Anthem Press: 2018.


Last modified 9 September 2018