His Books, and Where to Start

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. ECCLESIASTES 12:12–13

MacDonald wrote more than fifty books — sermons, novels, fairy tales, fantasies and poems — and it is not easy to know where to begin. All of them are in the public domain, and most are easy to find. What follows is a short guide, arranged for usefulness rather than chronology, with a suggested order of reading. At the end is a note on his influence, and especially on the reader who did most to keep his name alive.

Begin here

Unspoken Sermons (three series, 1867, 1885 and 1889). The heart of his work and the source of every chapter of this companion. All three series are in the Ochorus library as one book of thirty-six sermons. Do not try to read them straight through. Begin with The Child in the Midst, The Consuming Fire, The Way and The Word of Jesus on Prayer, and read one at a sitting, slowly. Then go on to Self-Denial, The Eloi, Abba, Father! and The New Name. Read Justice, Righteousness and The Last Farthing last, with chapters eleven and sixteen of this book in mind.

The Ochorus author page for George MacDonald carries a short biography and answers to common questions about his life and teaching.

His fantasies

Phantastes (1858). The faerie romance that first touched C. S. Lewis. Dreamlike and uneven, but haunting, and the best introduction to MacDonald the myth-maker.

Lilith (1895). His last long story, a dark and difficult dream of death and resurrection. For mature readers, and best read after Phantastes and with chapter sixteen of this book in mind, since it is shaped throughout by his hope for the salvation of all.

His stories for children

At the Back of the North Wind (1871). The story of Diamond and the North Wind, gentle and strange, about suffering, goodness and trust.

The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and its sequel The Princess and Curdie (1883). The princess Irene, the miner’s boy Curdie, and the great-great-grandmother with her thread. The first is the best place to start with his children’s books; the second is darker and more searching.

His shorter fairy tales, especially The Light Princess, The Golden Key and The Day Boy and the Night Girl, are collected in many editions. Read them aloud.

His novels

MacDonald’s novels of Scottish life were his most popular books in his own day, and they carry much of his teaching in the lives of their characters. They are long and full of dialect, and modern readers often prefer abridged editions. Good places to begin are Robert Falconer (1868), Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865), Malcolm (1875) and Sir Gibbie (1879), the story of a mute and barefoot orphan boy whose simple goodness is one of MacDonald’s finest portraits. Thomas Wingfold, Curate (1876), the story of a young clergyman who discovers that he does not believe what he preaches and sets out to find out whether it is true, is the most directly theological.

His poems and other writings

A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (1880). A short prayer in verse for every day of the year, written in the years of his greatest sorrow. Many readers keep it beside their Bibles.

The Miracles of Our Lord (1870) and The Hope of the Gospel (1892) are further collections of his teaching, close in spirit to the Unspoken Sermons. His essays on the imagination and on the fantastic imagination, gathered in collections such as A Dish of Orts, set out his view of story and wonder.

Letters and lives

His son Greville MacDonald wrote a long and loving account of his parents, George MacDonald and His Wife (1924), which remains the fullest source for his life. Among modern studies, William Raeper’s George MacDonald (1987) and Rolland Hein’s George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker (1993) are both careful and readable.

A suggested order

For a first year with MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin; four or five of the Unspoken Sermons, beginning with The Child in the Midst; Phantastes; At the Back of the North Wind; more of the sermons, one at a time; and then one of the novels, perhaps Sir Gibbie. Keep the Diary of an Old Soul for the hard seasons.

The master of C. S. Lewis

MacDonald’s reputation faded after his death, and it might have faded further but for one reader. In 1916 a seventeen-year-old atheist named Clive Staples Lewis, waiting for a train at Leatherhead station, bought a cheap copy of Phantastes from the bookstall. He remained an atheist for years afterwards. But he later said that the book had begun to work on his imagination long before the rest of him followed, and that it carried a quality he could only afterwards name as holiness.

Lewis came to regard MacDonald as his master, and he said that he had hardly written a book in which he did not quote him. In 1946 he published an anthology of short readings from MacDonald, drawn mostly from the Unspoken Sermons, because he wanted to spread MacDonald’s religious teaching rather than revive his literary fame. In The Great Divorce he made MacDonald himself the narrator’s guide through the outskirts of heaven. Lewis’s own books, which are still in copyright, are named here for the reader’s further study; Ochorus’s companion, The Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis, and the Portraits of Courage life of him are in the library.

It is worth repeating what chapter sixteen said. Lewis loved MacDonald without following him into universalism. He learned from him the goodness and holiness of God, the seriousness of obedience, and the power of the imagination to carry truth; he did not learn from him to hope that hell would at last be empty, and in The Great Divorce he set that question aside as one no creature inside time can answer.

Others learned from MacDonald too. G. K. Chesterton wrote that The Princess and the Goblin had made a difference to his whole way of seeing the world; his Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man are in the Ochorus library. J. R. R. Tolkien, asked late in life to write a preface for an edition of The Golden Key, found it growing instead into a story of his own. Through these writers and many after them, MacDonald’s Fairy Land has reached millions who have never heard his name.

Three counsels for reading him

Read him with the Bible open. MacDonald claimed no authority of his own, and he would have been the first to send you back to the words of Christ. Where he is plainly scriptural, receive it gladly. Where he goes beyond it or against it, weigh it, and hold fast to what is written.

Read him slowly. His sentences are long and his thought is dense. Take one sermon at a time, and think about it before you move on.

And read him as he would have wanted: not as an end in himself, but as a summons to obey. Close the book, and go and do something the Master tells you.

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. JOHN 14:6