Résumé
Résumé de Jess
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love Victorian adventure with a love story at its heart, and anyone curious about the Transvaal in the years of the first Boer War.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
Jess is an adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard, published in 1887. Haggard had lived in the Transvaal in southern Africa as a young colonial official, and he knew its farms, its wide skies and its tensions. He wrote this book out of that memory. It is set in the years around the first war between the Boers and the British, when the Transvaal was a land of divided loyalties.
The story follows John Niel, a quiet man who farms with an older partner, Silas Croft. The sisters Jess and Bessie, nieces of Croft, live on the farm, and a powerful Boer neighbour named Frank Muller soon takes a hard interest in them. You get a love story, a tale of danger on the veldt, and a picture of a country sliding toward war. Let us begin with the place where it all starts, a lonely farm and the people who live on it.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A lonely farm and two sistersFree
- 2A Boer suitor with a dark side
- 3Love grows in a quiet heart
- 4A country sliding toward war
- 5What the story is really about
- 6How Haggard tells it
Point clé 1 sur 6
A lonely farm and two sisters
The story opens on a farm in the Transvaal called Mooifontein, a name that means pretty fountain. It is home to Silas Croft, an Englishman who has made a quiet life there. His partner is John Niel, a former army captain who has come to the farm. Niel is steady and reserved.
In this settled household live two young women, nieces of Silas Croft. They are sisters, but they are very different. Jess is serious, thoughtful and shy, with a deep and watchful nature. Bessie is brighter and more openly charming, and she wins people over at once.
Haggard lets us see the farm, the work of the days and the habits of the household before trouble arrives. We need to care about these people before the country around them starts to threaten them.
Niel notices the sisters at once, and the reader soon feels where his heart is leaning. He is not a bold man, and his feelings stay mostly silent. That silence gives the early chapters their tension, since we are always waiting for what he will not say.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Jess
What is Jess by Rider Haggard about?
It is a novel set in the Transvaal around the first Boer War. A farmer named John Niel, two sisters and a dangerous Boer neighbour are caught between love, loyalty and the growing conflict in the country.
When was Jess written and is it a true story?
Haggard published it in 1887. It is fiction, but it draws on his own years in the Transvaal and on the real tensions that led to the first Boer War.
Who is Frank Muller in Jess?
Muller is a wealthy and forceful Boer neighbour of the farm at Mooifontein. He wants one of the sisters for himself and is the main danger to the household.
Is Jess hard to read?
No, the plot is clear and quick, and Haggard tells it plainly.
Is Jess worth reading after King Solomon's Mines?
It suits readers who want a Haggard story more rooted in real history and in romance than in lost worlds. It has the same pace but a quieter, more personal centre.