I spent many teenage hours reading Haggard, but went off him for two reasons. One was when I noted that the mysterious queens who had seemed so attractive as central figures, were always white - even Egyptian Ayesha. The other was in his collaboration with Andrew Lang, "The World's Desire". In rewriting the end of the Odyssey (in which I had a natural affinity with Odysseus' wife) and extolling Helen (to whose reign in Egypt he managed to introduce the Vikings), the authors included a sentence in which a man leaving his wife to worship the Strange Hathor explains that a woman cannot understand what draws him. This was written in such a way as to exclude the female reader of the book.

After a brief examination of the text, and a self examination, in which I considered that I was demonstrably in the top three percentiles of general intelligence, and therefore more intelligent than most men, I determined that what the secret was, if not the understanding of it, ought to be perceptible, if it was obvious to the thickest male. (I was a teenager, remember, and the interests of the males I knew were fairly transparent.)

What I deduced was that any man would find female beauty irresistable for obvious sexual reasons, and would leave his wife for the chance of some icon of loveliness, which is something women have known for all time, and if Haggard and Lang did not know that they were deluding themselves.

But what has kept me from Haggard was not that. It was that for years I was nagged by the thought that maybe I was wrong and they were right, and that there was something I was not allowed to know. I don't read writers who insult me.

Penny (and how very dare he challenge Homer and kill off Odysseus' wife?)