George MacDonald

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is a fantasy novel written by George MacDonald, first published in London in 1858. This was the first prose work published by MacDonald. Because of its limited financial success, MacDonald saw himself forced to turn to writing realistic novels. Phantastes, however, exerted a strong influence on fantasy authors of later generations: for example, C. S. Lewis in his book Surprised by Joy claimed that his imagination had been "baptized" by reading it. The story centers on the character Anodos ("pathless" or "ascent" in Greek) and takes its inspiration from German Romanticism, particularly Novalis. The story concerns a young man who is pulled into a dreamlike world and there hunts for his ideal of female beauty, embodied by the "Marble Lady." Anodos lives through many adventures and temptations while in the other world, until he is finally ready to give up his ideals.

Phantastes

George Macdonald

Anodos enters a dream-like fairyland of tree-spirits and magic, where he searches for the spirit of the Earth

Simon Elliott Stegall

Too boring for me to finish. I understand that McDonald was important for the fantasy genre, but he can't hold my attention for more than a paragraph. Maybe this says more about me than the book, but I couldn't bring myself to finish the last 30 pages.

"I was dead, and right content," the narrator says in the penultimate chapter of Phantastes. C.S. Lewis said that upon reading this astonishing 19th-century fairy tale he "had crossed a great frontier," and numerous others both before and since have felt similarly. In MacDonald's fairy tales, both those for children and (like this one) those for adults, the "fairy land" clearly represents the spiritual world, or our own world revealed in all of its depth and meaning. At times almost forthrightly allegorical, at other times richly dreamlike (and indeed having a close connection to the symbolic world of dreams), this story of a young man who finds himself on a long journey through a land of fantasy is more truly the story of the spiritual quest that is at the core of his life's work, a quest that must end with the ultimate surrender of the self. The glory of MacDonald's work is that this surrender is both hard won (or lost!) and yet rippling with joy when at last experienced. As the narrator says of a heavenly woman in this tale, "She knew something too good to be told." One senses the same of the author himself. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Macdonald, George

After he followed the old man through the mirror, nothing in his life was ever right again. It was a special mirror, and the man he followed was a special man

Lilith

Joshua Line

Terry Thomas

Rjyan C Kidwell

Sunyi Dean

Aleena Korell

Lilith is considered among the darkest of MacDonald's works, and among the most profound. It is a story concerning the nature of life, death and salvation. Many believe MacDonald is arguing for Christian universalism, or the idea that all will eventually be saved.

Phantastes

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