![]() It is a hybrid mix of prose and verse and could be labeled “experimental.” ![]() Phantastes is billed as a novel–but it isn’t quite. In the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, Lewis wrote, “What actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise … my imagination.” ![]() In Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he writes that he had long been on a fruitless quest for joy and finally found it in the ending of Phantastes, which converted him to Christianity. And his influence on other writers, especially C. He was dubbed the Father of Fantasy for his wild imagination and love of the fantasy/fairy tale genre. George MacDonald, a clergyman, a devout Christian, and a writer of fairy tales and fantasies, was, by all accounts, something of an intense character. But does it have MacDonald’s first adult novel Phantastes? Never mind: you can find an inexpensive Dover edition illustrated by Arthur Hughes at online bookstores, and there are countless editions by publishers I do not recognize. Perhaps your library still has these books. Perhaps you have read At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, or The Princess and Curdie. It is difficult to find the half-forgotten novels of 19th-century writers like George MacDonald, who is remembered, if at all, as a children’s fantasy writer. ![]()
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