On his twenty-fifth birthday, Leo Vincey opens the silver casket that his father has left to him. It contains a letter recounting the legend of a white sorceress who rules an African tribe and of his father’s quest to find this remote race. To find out for himself if the story is true, Leo and his companions set sail for Zanzibar. There, he is brought face to face with Ayesha, She-who-must-be-obeyed: dictator, femme fatale, tyrant and beauty. She has been waiting for centuries for the true descendant of Kallikrates, her murdered lover, to arrive, and arrive he does – in an unexpected form. Blending breathtaking adventure with a brooding sense of mystery and menace, She is a story of romance, exploration discovery and heroism that has lost none of its power to enthrall.

Ayesha, the Return of She is a gothic-fantasy novel by English Victorian author H. Rider Haggard, published in 1905, as a sequel to She. Chronologically, it is the final novel of the Ayesha and Allan Quatermain series. It was serialised in the Windsor Magazine issues 120 (December 1904) to 130 (October 1905), It was published by Newcastle Publishing Company as the fourteenth volume of the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library series in October 1977.In the introduction, Haggard links the name Ayesha to Muhammad's wives, and the Arabic name (Arabic: عائشة, ʻĀʼishah, pronounced [ˈʕaːʔɪʃa]), stating that it should be pronounced "Assha" although the pronunciation A-ye-sha is perhaps more common. Along with the other three novels in the series, Ayesha, the Return of She was adapted into the 1935 film She.

"I believe it was the old Egyptians – a very wise people, probably indeed much wiser than we know for in the leisure of their ample centuries they had time to think out things – who declared that each individual personality is made up of six or seven different elements, although the Bible only allows us three, namely body soul and spirit..." Wanting to learn if he can communicate with deceased loved ones, adventurer and trader Allan Quatermain seeks a meeting with the feared Zulu witch-doctor Zikali. He tells Allan he must seek out a great white sorceress who rules a hidden kingdom far to the north, and he charges Allan to take a message to her. En route, Quatermain encounters emigrant Scotsmen, cannibals, witch doctors, the beautiful Inez, and of course the mysterious She, or Ayesha. Although third in order of publication, this book is first in the chronology of the adventures of She.

A strange manuscript in an unknown language is found among the effects of the late Professor Horace Holly. Its translator discovers that while in Central Asia, Holly convinced the immortal Ayesha, also known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, to write her story - and this is the book they have found. Ayesha, born the daughter of a sheikh in the 4th century BCE, has no interest in the arranged marriage expected of her. She wants power and position of her own. Led by a vision to believe she is the daughter of Isis, she studies esoteric wisdom under the tutelage of the mystic Noot, but her beauty and intelligence make her a constant target in a world where women are still considered little better than possessions. To survive, she must rely on her wits (and perhaps a little divine intervention) in a series of daring escapes and desperate schemes, finding allies where she can. But as she climbs higher in the service of her goddess, a fateful meeting with the warrior-turned-priest Kallikrates leads her down a road even she would never have imagined. The fourth and final book in the She series.