The World's Desire is a classic fantasy novel first published in 1890 and written by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang. Its importance was recognized in its later revival in paperback by Ballantine Books as the fortieth volume of the celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in January, 1972.
The World's Desire is the story of the hero Odysseus, mainly referred to as "the Wanderer" for the bulk of the novel. Odysseus returns home to Ithaca after his second, unsung journey. He is hoping to find a "home at peace, wife dear and true and his son worthy of him". Unfortunately, he does not find any of the three, instead his home is ravaged by a plague and his wife Penelope has been slain. As he grieves, he is visited by an old flame, Helen of Troy, for whom the novel is named. Helen leads him to equip himself with the Bow of Eurytus and embark on his last journey. This is an exhausting journey in which he encounters a Pharaoh who is wed to a murderess beauty, a holy and helpful priest, and his own fate.
Read more about The World's Desire: Book I, Book II, Book III, Characters, Concept and Creation, Collaboration, Style, Adventure Romance, Imperial Gothic, Reception, Feminist Interpretations, Sexual Difference, References
Famous quotes containing the words the world, world and/or desire:
“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“‘Where is the world?’ cries Young, at eighty. ‘Where
The world in which a man was born?’”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“As desire recedes, the world becomes clear, pale, and empty.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)