George MacDonald

By: Suzanne Fischer
December 10, 2013

george-macdonald

GEORGE MACDONALD’s (1824–1905) characters are always walking through mirrors, descending to the underworld, climbing endlessly turning staircases, finding mysterious doors, crossing death to life. A Scottish Congregationalist preacher who turned to full-time writing after his universalism grew too broad for the pulpit, MacDonald’s constant concern was the other side of the dark mirror, what would happen when we saw Truth face to face. His fairy tales and more gnostic “visionary novels” were widely praised by his contemporaries; even now they seem to have grown from the ground. But MacDonald never gives in to sentimental piety. In The Golden Key, his pair of protagonists, Tangle and Mossy, find a key and set forth in search of the door it will open, growing old and traversing so many multivalent landscapes and trials that they resist allegory. His stories ring clear like the bells of the land beyond death.

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MORE FANTASY ON HILOBROW: CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM series | 65 Fantasy Adventures | Mervyn Peake | Lord Dunsany | H.P. Lovecraft | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Ursula K. LeGuin | Michael Moorcock | Gary Gygax | Clark Ashton Smith | Frank Frazetta | George MacDonald | John Bellairs | T.H. White | Wilkie Collins | M.R. James | Edgar Allan Poe | Lewis Carroll | Mikhail Bulgakov | Guy Endore | Alasdair Gray | Maurice Sendak | Tove Jansson | L. Frank Baum | Roald Dahl | Abraham Merritt | August Derleth | William Hope Hodgson | Madeleine L’Engle

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: William Lloyd Garrison, J Mascis, Ada Lovelace, Gertrud Kolmar.

READ MORE about men and women born on the cusp between the Retrogressivist (1815–24) and Post-Romantic (1825–33) Generations.