Sir Henry Rider Haggard was not a great artist in anyone's estimation, least of all his own. Still less was he a great writer of short fiction; one seeks in vain for his name in critical surveys of the short story of the nineteenth or early twentieth century. By far the greater part of his fictional output was novels--more than fifty novels, as opposed to three volumes of shorter fiction--and of those novels he is remembered for three of his earliest works: King Solomon's Mines (1885), She: A History of Adventure (1886), and Allan Quatermain (1887). The rest of his work, which he continued to write until his death in 1925, is now forgotten--for the most part deservedly so. Yet in his day Haggard was the most popular writer in England and among the highest earning, commanding large sums from publishers' advances, magazine serializations, and the sheer volume of sales of his...