Much better as a mere concept, because the execution... Nope. Reading She was like a rollercoaster. First you spot a beautiful description of something, then you get swamped by some endless journey to I-couldn't-care-less-where, then there's an interesting discussion about religion, then you just feel like hitting your head with the book etc. Talk about hot and cold! It seemed like there was enough material for just a short novella.

It's no wonder that She has sparked discussion about femininity and colonial attitudes, though. I liked the mystical aspect of a raven-haired beauty ruling over a whole tribe in some mysterious part of Africa (this was completely botched in the clinical Hammer movie adaptation). Ayesha seems both vulnerable and harsh, yearning for her dead lover but also believing that mere beauty makes up for sin etc. Haggard, on the other hand, seems to preach a point about passion being wrong and destructive, and that Ayesha is wrong when she says there's no purely good and evil but instead good intentions can sometimes spark evil consequences. And what about the tribe then? Well, they clearly have no morals, so they need a white woman to put them in their place.

Overall an oddly mixed bag of old-fashioned ideals and progressive concepts.

"Each religion claims the future for its followers; or, at least, the good thereof. The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly. The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature. Ah! if man would but see that hope is from within and not from without—that he himself must work out his own salvation! He is there, and within him is the breath of life and a knowledge of good and evil as good and evil is to him. Thereon let him build and stand erect, and not cast himself before the image of some unknown God, modelled like his poor self, but with a bigger brain to think the evil thing, and a longer arm to do it."

"Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?"

"And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been."