This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.  My empire is of the imagination, proclaims white queen Ayesha, She-who-must-be-obeyed.She is a spiritual romance in which Haggard explores not only the imagined city of Kôr, last remnant of an ancient, collapsed civilization, but his own concerns about science, society, and empire. To the twenty-first-century reader,She offers more than an entertaining tale of adventure, though it is that; it offers an exploration of the nineteenth-century imperial imagination.

Henry Rider Haggard, born in 1856 and raised in West Norfolk, moved to South Africa in 1875, where he became a private secretary to the Lieutenant Governor of Natal and later an ostrich farmer. He enjoyed the independence and adventure colonial service offered a young man and wrote frequent articles describing Africa for a variety of magazines. After the rebellion of the Dutch Boers against British rule in Transvaal, Haggard moved back to London, where he began writing about South Africa and lost civilizations.