The World's Desire - Collaboration

Collaboration

The World’s Desire was not the first time Haggard and Lang worked together. During their collaboration, Lang helped Haggard plan and revise She, Allan’s Wife, Beatrice, Eric Brighteyes, Nada the Lily and also added poems to Cleopatra. The pair also carried on a correspondence on the dedication pages of their separate works. They were very supportive of each other’s progress and proud of the advancements in the romance genre they had made. Lang wrote poems hailing Haggard and their colleague Stevenson for bringing romance novels back to life. While Lang appreciated Haggard’s imagination, he was continually attempting to give shape to Haggard’s florid prose style. For the greater part of the novel The World’s Desire, Haggard is responsible for the final form, having reworked Lang’s revisions, while the first four chapters (including the Greek episode), written after the central portion, are wholly Lang’s. Their collaboration was a turning point in the genre of romance. For the two men, writing about Greece- a homosexual utopia- was an act calculated to reassert the masculinity of British fiction and to steal fire back from women writers. In fact, one goal of Lang’s partnership with Haggard was the exclusion of women based on his belief that women were incapable of understanding male romance novels.