H. Rider Haggard and the New Woman: A Difference in the Genre in Jess and Beatrice

Often criticism on Haggard locates him as a chronicler of male angst in the complex context of late-Victorian literature and topics of empire. There is a more neglected aspect of his writing—his treatment of the position of women and the marriage question in his less-often read novels of English domestic life. In Jess (1887) and Beatrice (1890) he is in effect justifying extramarital sexual relations, affirming his sympathy for the participants. Unlike characters in other male novelists (Gissing, Hardy, and Allen), Jess and Beatrice are keenly aware of their “sin”; they take their own lives not because they are ashamed of what they have done but to protect those they love. They regard it as the fleshly expression of the highest form of love, aspiring to recreate it in a spiritual form in an afterlife.

They are admirable because of their capacity for self-sacrifice and their spirituality, a salient difference with other depictions of New Women.