The study of literate practices, intellectual exchanges, and the circulation of letters and correspondences enables an understanding of friendships as a constitutive part of interdependent networks that integrate the trajectories of intellectuals. Friendships, besides establishing networks of mutual influence and creating places of coexistence, are driving forces that intensify personal relationships and distinguish them from other social relations, thus the epistolary practice inscribes itself in a movement of self-fashioning. From this theoretical-conceptual perspective, this paper aims to analyze the intellectual sociabilities and practices of friendship between the novelist H. Rider Haggard and the folklorist/anthropologist Andrew Lang, between the 1880s and 1910s, with special attention to the letters exchanged between these literati and their intellectual collaborations in the fields of literature and journalism. The analysis of the letters between Lang and Haggard, collected at the Norfolk Records Office, enables an understanding of the social construction process of friendship and the convergences between literature and anthropology, especially in the adventure novels written by Haggard and set in southern Africa. Additionally, the investigation of this archival material allows reflecting on the presence of literary elements in Lang's anthropological texts, especially in the representation of Zulu religious practices through recurrent literary tropes in late-nineteenth-century adventure novels.