The tribute Lewis pays to MacDonald and Phantastes in The Great Divorce perhaps does as much justice to his debt as any statement: When asked for a list of the ten books which most influenced his writing, Lewis placed Phantastes at the top of his list. It tuned me up to a higher pitch and delighted me.” Elsewhere, Lewis described MacDonald’s works as “fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and mythopoeic.” Lewis considered Phantastes and Lilith among the handful of MacDonald’s most important stories, along with The Golden Key, The Wise Woman and the Curdie books. Lewis wrote in his diary that, “I read MacDonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book.

It was MacDonald’s Phantastes, which Lewis once picked up at a train station for some weekend reading, that transported Lewis to a “new region all the confusions that had hitherto perplexed my search for Joy were disarmed.” While Lewis was not yet a Christian at the time (he claimed that while reading Phantastes “nothing was at that time farther from my thoughts than Christianity”), MacDonald inspired Lewis to later write his own faith-imbued fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia. White ( The Once and Future King), Neil Gamain, Madeleine L’Engle, and Oswald Chambers. Auden, Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz), T.H. These reviews will help us to better understand the seminal influence of the writer who pioneered the modern fantasy genre, served as mentor to Lewis Carroll, and inspired a host of other renowned authors including C.S.

The plots, significance, and sampling of insights from each work are presented in a pair of articles in this issue of An Unexpected Journal.

Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) are considered among a handful of George MacDonald’s best fantasy novels but are little read. “It is an indication of the trend and shallowness of the modern reading public that George MacDonald’s books have been so neglected.” – Oswald Chambers “I did not yet know the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. “My spirits rose as I went deeper into the forest … I found cheerfulness to be like life itself – not to be created by any argument”

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