SOURCE: Stiebel, Lindy. “‘As Europe is to Africa, So is Man to Woman’: Gendering Landscape in Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily.” Current Writing 12, no. 1 (April 2000): 63-74.

In the following essay, Stiebel argues that in his fiction H. Rider Haggard sexualizes and feminizes the African landscape.

The geographies of adventures … enable writers and readers to remove themselves from the messy realities and textured experiences of here and now, enabling them to imagine alternatives, other possible worlds, departures from the status quo.

(Phillips 1997:168)

One of Rider Haggard's first biographers, Morton Cohen, writes that “[f]or many Englishmen, Africa became the Africa of King Solomon's Mines” (1960:94). What Haggard continued to do after this, his first successful African romance, was to work the same canvas, repeating certain features, embellishing, adding, until he had created an instantly recognisable ‘Africa’ for his readers. In the same way that certain writers are always linked to...