Haggard continued writing novels throughout his literary career despite the fact that it was his romances, particularly his early ones that established his reputation, bringing him fame and fortune. Although his novels were less commercially successful, Haggard had a personal regard for them. He states of several that he wrote them to please himself, and of others that he considered them to be amongst his better work, and he implies that he would have preferred writing novels rather than romances were it not for the need to earn a comfortable living. His valuation of them seems to reside in his belief that in them he was able to consider subjects he regarded as important. Although, by his own frank admission, Haggard was not a truly ‘literary’ writer he had a personal sense of the worth of some of his fiction and an apparently sincere concern that at least some of it would continue to be read. Although he does not specify which of his books he had in mind, it seems reasonable to assume from his comments about their worth that they included some of his novels and, since the theme of the sexual imperative features consistently and prominently in them, that this was a theme he regarded as significant. It is a theme that reverberates through his closest personal experiences as an exploration of his relationship with the five key women in his life reveals.

Romance and Realism

Haggard wrote 58 works of fiction and 10 works of non-fiction, published variously by Trubner; Hurst and Blackett; Cassell; Longmans, Green; Smith, Elder; J. W. Arrowsmith; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; Ward Lock; Hutchinson; Hodder & Stoughton; Eveleigh Nash; John Murray; and Stanley Paul. But it was not until 1904, with the publication by Cassell of The Brethren, that his publishers took to dividing his fictional works, in the frontispiece of his books, into novels and romances – of which, when his last book had been published, 11 were classified as novels and 47, including 3 collections of short stories, as romances. There is no extant evidence to record why Haggard, his publishers or his literary agent decided to advertise the obvious differences between the two categories into which his fiction falls.