Henry Rider Haggard was born in 1856 in Norfolk, England, and came from a large landed family that had largely exhausted its money by the time he was an adult. He was not a strong student and was the only Haggard son sent out into the colonies rather than to a proper public school. In 1875, at nineteen, he was attached to the staff of the new governor of Natal in southern Africa, and the six years he spent in colonial service in Natal and the Transvaal gave him the material for almost everything he later wrote. He was present at the British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877. He met Zulu warriors who had fought at Isandlwana. He learned enough Zulu to use it in his fiction, though imperfectly.He returned to England, qualified as a barrister, married, and started writing colonial novels. The first two failed. The third, King Solomon's Mines, came out in 1885 and made him a household name almost overnight. Two years later he published both Allan Quatermain and She, which between them established him as the most popular adventure novelist in the English-speaking world after Stevenson. He kept writing at high volume for the rest of his life, producing nearly seventy books across forty years, including agricultural surveys, historical novels, autobiographies, and the long Quatermain and Ayesha sequences that fans still read.Later in life he became increasingly involved in agricultural reform and rural welfare, traveling widely on commissions investigating land use and emigration. He was knighted in 1912. His later fiction is mixed. The early books still represent the high-water mark of Victorian adventure fiction, though their imperial worldview is often uncomfortable for modern readers. He died in 1925.
