The Literary Gothic | George MacDonald

MacDonald, George

10 December 1824 - 10 September 1905

Scottish poet, novelist, and clergyman, MacDonald is perhaps best known to general audiences today as a fantasist and children's author.

Sites:

The Golden Key: MacDonald Web Page this link opens a new window

Includes timeline, bibliography, links to McDonald texts and Web sites, this is a valuable resource for the MacDonald fan. [Mike Partridge]

George MacDonald Overview

[Victorian Web, Brown]

George MacDonald Society

While more an analog than digital society, this British group does make available at this website the full texts of some scholarly articles dealing with MacDonald's work (see below).

Biographical note

[Writing Scotland; BBC]

Biographical note

Part of the PBS website for the 2000 Masterpiece Theatre production of E. Nesbit's classic The Railway Children.

Brief biographical note

[Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartleby]

Brief biographical note

[John W. Cousins, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910]

MacDonald Hyper-Concordance

Part of the The Victorian Literary Studies Archive, this concordance allows you to search etexts of MacDonald's works, including Phantastes.

Portraits

[National Portrait Gallery, London]

Etexts:

"The Fantastic Imagination"

MacDonald's introduction to The Light Princess. [The Golden Key]

"The Golden Key"

First published in Dealings with the Fairies (1867).

- at The Golden Key (60K)
- at Gaslight (62K)

Lilith [1895]

- at Christian Classics Ethereal Library (Table of Contents)

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women [1858]

- entire text (430K) or Table of Contents. [Etext Center, UVA]
-- Phantastes overview [Victorian Web, Brown]

"The Haunted House" [1883]

A Gothic poem

- at Gaslight (11K)

click the cover image for more info from Amazon.com

Books:

Several of the works mentioned above, including "The Fantastic Imagination" and "The Golden Key" (as well as "The Light Princess" and a number of others) are available in the Penguin Classics edition of MacDonald's Complete Fairy Tales, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher, the well-known scholar of C19 British literature.

Essays and Reviews:

The following essays are available from The George MacDonald Society, which posts the full texts of some essays from its scholarly journal The North Wind. Note that these essays are copyrighted by the George MacDonald Society and may not be reproduced without permission.

In addition to the articles listed below, other articles from more recent issues of The North Wind are available at the Society's website.

Beasts and Monsters in MacDonald's Fantasy Stories

by Dieter Petzold

The Sleep of the Soul: Night's Pore in Torments

by Adelheid Kegler

A Crystal City: Sodom - Bulika - Jerusalem

by Karl Kegler

Antigravity: Matter and the Imagination of George MacDonald's Early Science Fiction

by Elmar Schenke

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Robert Falconer

by Peter Butter

George MacDonald and Jean Paul: An Introduction

by William Webb