Not long after my previous post about John C. Wright's review of Phantastes, I stumbled across two more local resources on George MacDonald. The first was a mis-shelved copy of one of his novels that I hadn't read yet, in a church library. It is one of the abridged and de-dialect-ized editions from the 1980s, but still much better than nothing. MacDonald's fantasy novels for adults came at the very beginning and end of his career: Phantastes at the start, and Lilith at the close. The ones in between, besides his short stories and children's books, were almost all set in the everyday Victorian society of the time, and MacDonald attempted to bring spiritual truth very close to home for his readers.
I also finally got around to looking at the latest issue of Christian History magazine, and while the theme this time is the artist and missionary Lilias Trotter, there is quite a bit about MacDonald because he was a famous friend of a famous friend of hers, John Ruskin.
Trotter had a great deal of potential as a young artist, and Ruskin offered to train her and launch her into the uppermost level of the Victorian artist scene, but she chose instead to follow God, ending up in long-term missions work in Algiers.
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