MACDONALD, George

“I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”

Scottish born George Macdonald started his working life as a clergyman, but his attitude was rather too easy-going for his Calvanistic congregation, and he was soon asked to leave.  However he started to write at this time, and in 1855 Within and Without, a dramatic epic poem, was published, followed in 1857 by a second book of poetry.  It was in 1858 with the publication of Phantastes, a ground-breaking fairytale for adults, that Macdonald finally achieved success and was able to become a full time writer.  He achieved equal success with his two great children’s fantasy stories, The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and its sequel The Princess and Curdie (1883), in which he “quietly suggest(s) in every incident ideas of courage and honor”.   Over his career he wrote more than 50 books, but it is for his fantasy work that he is best remembered, and is often regarded as the founding father of modern fantasy writing, who inspired writers such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein.  C. S. Lewis, in particular, credited reading Macdonald’s Phantastes as a pivotal moment in his writing career "Now Phantastes . . had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence .. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise ... my imagination"  and G. K. Chesterton wrote that The Princess and the Goblin "made a difference to my whole existence".

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