Special Feature: George MacDonald

[Lindir]

In total, I've read The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind, "The Light Princess," "The Golden Key," "The Wise Woman," "The Grey Wolf," and, most recently, Phantastes. I wasn't overly enamored with the latter—it was heavy on imagery but short on plot—but I loved all the stories I read when I was younger, particularly The Princess and the Goblin. These were favorites of my childhood, and I'd like to take the time out to rediscover them sometime. I'm also interested in giving Lilith a shot, although I hear it's much like Phantastes.

Lysander,
I personally think Lilith and Phantastes are both a little weird a somewhat hard to follow. I liked Lilith, even if I didn't understand a bunch of it. It draws you right into the book, so that you're experiencing it, not reading it.

I've read quite a few of his short stories also, including "The Grey Wolf". One of my very favorites is "The History of Photogen and Nycteris (The Day Boy and the Night Girl)".
The book, "The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Stories and Fairytales" is a compilation by Glenn Edward Sadler. It's not in print anymore I don't think, but I ordered it at Barnes and Noble and got it in great condition. It was a little pricey, but it's totally worth it for this book.

Anyway, I liked The Princess and Curdie better than The Princess and the Goblin, probably since the main character is a boy.

I have read George MacDonald's adult books also and love The Laird's Inheritance, Alec Forbes and His Friend Annie, The Adventures of Ronald Bannerman, Wee Sir Gibbie of the Highlands, etc.

One of my very favorite books is At the Back of the North Wind, illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith!

Also, The Lost Princess (Alternate title: Wise Woman?) retold and illustrated by Karen Mezek is fantastic. I haven't fully read the unabridged of this story, just parts of it.

Needless to say, George MacDonald is one of my favorite authors and I'm collecting his books.

Let me know if you want any recommendations or opinions!

[wisewoman]

The Princess and the Goblin it is. I've added it to the collection known as "Hovering High on the To-Read List" in my LT catalog, and that makes it official . Thanks for the recommendation!

Maybe if I hurry with my Collins book, I can squeeze it in before this SF is over. The SFs are keeping me busy lately. But I don't think I have time to squeeze in Dickens

[Lindir]

SF is Science Fiction?

Charles Dickens has written some good ones too! "Bleak House", "Our Mutual Friend"...

But we're not talking about him, are we?

[wisewoman]

SF, in the NWeb world, is short for Special Feature. The Dickens Special Feature is here. For more on how SFs work, see the Spare Oom Bylaws (especially number 1)

[Aslanisthebest]

Oh! I wonder why I hadn't noticed this earlier. I love George MacDonald's books!

Although, I've only read 3 books by him, if I remember correctly. Those being The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, and The Lost Princess. I enjoyed all of those immensly.

I think my favourite is Goblin, perhaps because the story seems to me, more magical and sweet than the rest. (I liked Curdie alot, though. )

Sadly, the only version of Curdie I read was abridged, I had gotten the right one but didn't get around to reading it. I should read it, though. (Does anyone else but me have a strong disliking for abridged books that don't indicate that they are abridged?!)

The Lost Princess was a nice one! It was an easy read, but I still really liked it. The version that I put on hold had really neat illustrations, which made it more enjoyable.

There was another book by him I was going to read, I forgot what it was called. I think it's The Light Princess. I was going to put that on hold, but the only copy of it had wierd illustrations in it, so. I really need to read more books by George MacDonald!

[daughter of the King]

By all means, read The Light Princess. It is one of my favorites.

[wisewoman]

Okay, I read The Princess and the Goblin over the weekend and here are my thoughts. Apologies to anyone who adores the book; I just couldn't get into it . Perhaps if I had been much younger when I read it...

[daughter of the King]

I can understand where you're coming from. His theology is flawed, there's no way around that. The Princess and Curdie weirded me out the first time I read it and it was awhile before I picked it up again. Though it did remind me of the part in Prince Caspian with the wild bear. You might have an easier time with some of his short stories. Gifts of the Christ Child was excellent(it's been a few years since I read it, so I don't remember much except I thought it was very bittersweet). Don't feel obliged though, I think George MacDonald is the sort of author that readers either love or hate and there isn't much of in between.

[wisewoman]

I do plan on reading more of MacDonald eventually. Maybe I'll like his other stuff better

[Destined-To-Reign]

I'm sorry you did not love The Princess and the Goblin as much as some of us do, ww. Your review made sense, though-and the title has always bothered me as well! I agree that you would probably have liked it more if you had read it when you were younger. I practically grew up with the Curdie books. I wonder how you would like At the Back of the North Wind? That's a very queer, one-of-a-kind book.

I like George MacDonald a great deal. I read some of his historical fiction/romance/whatcha-may-call-them, but was not all that impressed. In the first place, they were edited/abridged (which I found out afterwards), and that explains to me why they weren't really satisfying. I found a lot lacking in them.
I love his fantasy best.
I've read:
The Princess and the Goblin
The Princess and Curdie
At the Back of the North Wind
Phantastes
The Golden Key
And a few of his historical fiction books, whose names are too alike for me to remember.

I grew up with the first 3, and love them a lot. I read Phantastes 2 or 3 years ago, and it astounded, amazed, and dazzled me. I gave it the highest rating possible in my record book, along with some exclamation points. Since then I've heard a lot of people call it disjointed, insensible, or boring-so I want to read it again, and see if I fall in love all over again. I also read The Golden Key several years ago, and didn't understand it very well.
I would like to read Lilith soon, as it's been compared to Phantastes.

Have there been any movies made of MacDonald books?

[Meltintalle]

I've seen a rumour that there's an animated version of The Princess and the Goblin...

Ah-ha. Ye olde rumour faileth not. The Princess and the Goblin (1992)

And then, if I do a search on George McDonald, I come up with the fact that there was a made for TV movie in the 70's of The Light Princess and another version of The Princess and the Goblin from Jackanory.

All of which means very little to me, but it's kind of interesting.

[Atamar]

I think my favorite MacDonald book (of the ones I've read) is definitely What's Mine's Mine; though "At the Back Of the North Wind" and the "Princess and the Goblin" and the "Princess and Curdie" are favorites as well.
We've read several of MacDonald's books as a family, and he is definitely a favorite. My Mom and both my older sisters have a nice set of most of his books. Someday....................

~Ata

[Tangle]

Has anyone else read C.S. Lewis' anthology on George MacDonald?

[lysander]

I read Phantastes 2 or 3 years ago, and it astounded, amazed, and dazzled me.... Since then I've heard a lot of people call it disjointed, insensible, or boring

Oh dear, you make me (and those of my ilk) sound so villainous here. I admit it - guilty as charged. In my defense, though, your gushing about it has made me want to give it another try as well, although it's not anywhere near the top of my list of MacDonald titles to read/reread.

I'm not sure if I saw the Jackanory version, Mel, but I did watch the newer Princess and the Goblin and I recall thinking it a bad adaptation. (Picture me, at about the age of six, sitting in front of the television and making mental lists of all the things that were changed from the book. Oh, yes. ) I also saw The Light Princess, which I posted about on the last page. The sorceress scared me to death, and what with the mixture of live action and animation it all felt a little trippy, but I think it was closer to the original story than the P&tG cartoon.

[Phosphorus]

I am completely mystified by the way this works. I tried to reply, it asked me if I wanted to save the draft or something of that sort, and I hit yes, and now nothing's there anymore. Anyway, here's the post again.

I thought it would be appropriate to post some quotes on George MacDonald by C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. First, from Suprised by Joy on the reading of Phantastes:

It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new... I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness... There was no temptation to confuse the scenes of the tale with the light that rested upon them, or to suppose that they were put forward as realities, or even to dream that if they had been realities and I could reach the woods where Anodos journeyed I should thereby come a step nearer to my desire... Thus, when the great moments came I did not break away from the woods and cottages that I read of to seek some bodiless light, shining beyond them... For I now perceived that while the air of the new region made all my erotic and magical perversions of Joy look like sordid trumpery, it had no such disenchanting power over the bread upon the table or the coals in the grate. That was the marvel. Up till now each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert.... Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did not like the return to ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.

And by G.K. Chesterton:

Certain magazines have symposiums (I will call them 'symposia' if I am allowed to call the two separate South Kensington collections 'musea') in which persons are asked to name 'Books that have Influenced Me', on the lines of 'Hymns that have Helped Me'. It is not a very realistic process as a rule, for our minds are mostly a vast uncatalogued library; and for a man to be photographed with one of the books in his hand generally means at best that he has chosen at random, and at worst that he is posing for effect. But in a certain rather special sense I for one can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I have read, including even all the novels of the same novelist, it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called <The Princess and the Goblin>, and is by George MacDonald, the man who is the subject of this book.

When I say it is like life, what I mean is this. It describes a little princess living in a castle in the mountains which is perpetually undermined, so to speak, by subterranean demons who sometimes come up through the cellars. She climbs up the castle stairways to the nursery or the other rooms; but now and again the stairs do not lead to the usual landings, but to a new room she has never seen before, and cannot generally find again. Here a good great-grandmother, who is a sort of fairy godmother, is perpetually spinning and speaking words of understanding and encouragement. When I read it as a child, I felt that the whole thing was happening inside a real human house, not essentially unlike the house I was living in, which also had staircases and rooms and cellars. This is where the fairy-tale differed from many other fairy-tales; above all, this is where the philosophy differed from many other philosophies. I have always felt a certain insufficiency about the ideal of Progress, even of the best sort which is a Pilgrim's Progress. It hardly suggests how near both the best and the worst things are to us from the first; even perhaps especially at the first. And though like every other sane person I value and revere the ordinary fairy-tale of the miller's third son who set out to seek his fortune (a form which MacDonald himself followed in the sequel called <The Princess and Curdie>), the very suggestion of travelling to a far-off fairyland, which is the soul of it, prevents it from achieving this particular purpose of making all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things.

Dr. Greville MacDonald, in his intensely interesting memoir of his father which follows, has I think mentioned somewhere his sense of the strange symbolism of stairs. Another recurrent image in his romances was a great white horse; the father of the princess had one, and there was another in <The Back of the North Wind>. To this day I can never see a big white horse in the street without a sudden sense of indescribable things. But for the moment I am speaking of what may emphatically be called the presence of household gods - and household goblins. And the picture of life in this parable is not only truer than the image of a journey like that of the Pilgrim's Progress, it is even truer than the mere image of a siege like that of The Holy War. There is - something not only imaginative but intimately true about the idea of the goblins being below the house and capable of besieging it from the cellars When the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside. Anyhow, that simple image of a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always wait for the one and watch against the other, has always remained in my mind as something singularly solid and unanswerable; and was more corroborated than corrected when I came to give a more definite name to the lady watching over us from the turret, and perhaps to take a more practical view of the goblins under the floor. Since I first read that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe have come to our colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world like the east wind. But for me that castle is still standing in the mountains and the light in its tower is not put out.

All George MacDonald's other stories, interesting and suggestive in their several ways, seem to be illustrations and even disguises of that one I say disguises, for this is the very important difference between his sort of mystery and mere allegory. The commonplace allegory takes what it regards as the commonplaces or conventions necessary to ordinary men and women, and tries to make them pleasant or picturesque by dressing them up as princesses or goblins or good fairies. But George MacDonald did really believe that people were princesses and goblins and good fairies, and he dressed them up as ordinary men and women. The fairy-tale was the inside of the ordinary story and not the outside. One result of this is that all the inanimate objects that are the stage properties of the story retain that nameless glamour which they have in a literal fairy-tale. The staircase in <Robert Falconer> is as much of a magic ladder as the staircase in the <Princess and the Goblin>; and when the boys are making the boat and the girl is reciting verses to them, in <Alec Forbes>, and some old gentleman says playfully that it will rise to song like a magic Scandinavian ship, it always seemed to me as if he were describing the reality, apart from the appearance, of the incident. The novels as novels are uneven, but as fairy-tales they are extraordinarily consistent. He never for a moment loses his own inner thread that runs through the patchwork, and it is the thread that the fairy great-grandmother put into the hands of Curdie to guide him out of the mazes of the goblins.

[...]I make no attempt here to fix his place in literature. He is in any case one of the kind that it is most difficult to fix. He wrote nothing empty; but he wrote much that is rather too full, and of which the appreciation depends rather on a sympathy with the substance than on the first sight of the form. As a matter of fact, the mystics have not often been men of letters in the finished and almost professional sense. A thoughtful man will now find more to think about in Vaughan or Crashaw than in Milton, but he will also find more to criticize; and nobody need deny that in the ordinary sense a casual reader may wish there was less of Blake and more of Keats. But even this allowance must not be exaggerated; and it is in exactly the same sense in which we pity a man who has missed the whole of Keats or Milton, that we can feel compassion for the critic who has not walked in the forest of Phantastes or made the acquaintance of Mr. Cupples in the adventures of Alec Forbes.

I don't have quotes from Tolkien, but basically he loved The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind as a child, and confessed to drawing from the former as the only fairy-tale work that influenced The Hobbit. In preparing for his lecture On Fairy Stories he drew heavily from The Golden Key, but he later came to despise it as he did most Victorian work. Ironically, Smith of Wootton Major began as an idea for the preface of that story. He also strongly disliked Phantastes. Especially he criticized MacDonald for being incoherent, moralizing, and allegorical despite some memorable passages.

[lysander]

I love those quotes from Chesterton. Makes me want to reread The Princess and the Goblin.