George MacDonald was the great nineteenth-century innovator of modern fantasy, who influenced the work of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. This book collects some of his finest fairy stories, including "The Gray Wolf," "The Cruel Painter," "The Broken Swords," "The Wow O'Rivven, the Bell" "Uncle Cornelius, His Story," "The Butcher's Bills," and "Birth, Dreaming, Death."
"I do not write," MacDonald once said, "for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five." Here then, for the childlike of all ages, is a collection of seven stories certain to delight both confirmed MacDonald readers and those about to meet him for the first time.
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“George MacDonald is preeminently a mythopoeic writer…. In his power to project his inner life into images, beings, landscapes which are valid for all, he is one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth centry.”
— W. H. Auden
“What George MacDonald does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man.”
— C. S. Lewis“Surely George MacDonald is the grandfather of us all—all of us who struggle to come to terms with truth through fantasy."
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George MacDonald (1824–1905), Scottish children’s author and novelist, was educated at Aberdeen University before training as a Congregational minister. Finding his own individualistic views unacceptable to his parish, he gradually turned to literature. He published over fifty volumes of fiction, verse, children’s stories, and sermons but is remembered chiefly for his fairy stories, including The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and its sequel The Princess and Curdie (1873).