‘There she sat, straight and still, and clothed in shining white and veiled’, Maurice Greiffenhagen in H. Rider Haggard, Ayesha: The Return of She (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1905), p. ‘It rose, it stood up, a human figure.’ Maurice Greiffenhagen in H. Rider Haggard, She and Allan (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1921), Frontispiece. ‘There, on the point of the pillar, stood Ayesha herself!’, Maurice Greiffenhagen in H. ‘She grew white and silent as the corpse upon the bier behind her.’, Maurice Greiffenhagen in H.

‘Mummy love’? The gothic guises of Ayesha clockwise from top left: This, I believe, is connected to the cultural impact of the language of flowers, which had its roots at the beginning of the nineteenth century and remained in circulation at the fin de siècle when Haggard and Stoker were writing. Floral symbolism is more common in Victorian fictions than we might assume, and it is rarely used arbitrarily.

Floriography is not necessarily solely connected to a femme fatale but has wider implications relating to the tone, style and construction of the world of the novel – the duplicity, betrayal, tragedy and atmosphere of decay and death which run throughout the story of Haggard’s Cleopatra. This ‘gothic aesthetic’ is not just a subjective imposition, a case of reading the text through a gothic lens, but integral to Haggard’s reimagining of the narrative of Antony and Cleopatra. The ‘gothic aesthetic’ created through the mummy’s curse narrative is enhanced by a garden of poisonous floriography. Floriography is not limited to these two novels within the oeuvres of Stoker and Haggard – we may find further examples of floriography in Haggard’s Cleopatra (1889) where the rose, lotus, poppy and pomegranate contribute to creating a poisonous dramatic setting.

The garlic flower of Dracula and perfume within She are intertwined with the femmes fatales of these works – Lucy Westenra and Ayesha, respectively. Rider Haggard’s She (1886-7) has been adapted from a distinctly masculine-Gothic perspective to influence the narrative direction of the texts. In the Gothic Studies articles ‘ Blooming Marvel’ and ‘She shook her heavy tresses’, I assess the ways in which floral symbolism (or floriography) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and H.

Cleopatra haggard