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    Lilith
    Lilith
    Lilith
    Ebook384 pages

    Lilith

    By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

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    The 19th-century British author’s fantastical masterpiece, “the first text to employ the idea of going through a mirror into another world” (The List, “100 Best Scottish Books of All Time”).
     
    Subtitled, a little oddly, “A Romance,” which assuredly it is not, eight distinct manuscript versions of Lilith exist, chronicling the book’s fitful development under MacDonald’s pen until its release in 1895. Some view Lilith as the otherworldly climax of MacDonald’s literary career. As in Phantastes, with which Lilith is usually linked, the narrator finds himself embarking on a quest. But unlike the earlier journey into the land of faerie, that of Lilith is an inward journey that leads to the world of death, exploring what new self-awarenesses, even repentance, may be possible in that realm. Lilith is decidedly dark and difficult to grasp and is not for all readers. MacDonald himself felt that it had been inspired by God as his “final message,” though his wife Louisa was troubled by it and counseled her husband not to publish it. This edition for The Cullen Collection is unedited in any way.
     
    “An extremely Freudian book, with sexualized old testament type lusty biblical images, and feelings, which is very surprising, as it was written in Victorian times, by a minister, as that was what MacDonald was . . . This is all spun out in an engrossing prose, with beautiful poetic descriptives, and with much passion and Art. The World of the book seems to me to be much more real, and more terrible, then Tolkien, and more anguished. The writing . . . is both extremely literate, and lavish.”—Daily Kos
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 31, 2018
    ISBN9780795351884
    Author

    George MacDonald

    George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a popular Scottish lecturer and writer of novels, poetry, and fairy tales. Born in Aberdeenshire, he was briefly a clergyman, then a professor of English literature at Bedford and King's College in London. W. H. Auden called him "one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century."

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      Wow. So many books. I have a lot of reading to do... If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top

    Book preview

    Lilith - George MacDonald

    Lilith

    The Cullen Collection

    George MacDonald

    Introductory material © 2018 by Michael Phillips

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

    Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

    ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5188-4

    www.RosettaBooks.com

    The Cullen Collection

    of the Fiction of George MacDonald

    New editions of George MacDonald’s classic fiction works updated and introduced by Michael Phillips

    The Cullen Collection of the

    Fiction of George MacDonald

    1. Phantastes (1858)

    2. David Elginbrod (1863)

    3. The Portent (1864)

    4. Adela Cathcart (1864)

    5. Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)

    6. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)

    7. Robert Falconer (1868)

    8. Guild Court (1868)

    9. The Seaboard Parish (1868)

    10. At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

    11. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)

    12. The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

    13. Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872)

    14. The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)

    15. Gutta Percha Willie (1873)

    16. Malcolm (1875)

    17. The Wise Woman (1875)

    18. St. George and St. Michael (1876)

    19. Thomas Wingfold Curate (1876)

    20. The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

    21. Paul Faber Surgeon (1879)

    22. Sir Gibbie (1879)

    23. Mary Marston (1881)

    24. Castle Warlock (1881)

    25. The Princess and Curdie (1882)

    26. Weighed and Wanting (1882)

    27. Donal Grant (1883)

    28. What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)

    29. Home Again (1887)

    30. The Elect Lady (1888)

    31. A Rough Shaking (1890)

    32. There and Back (1891)

    33. The Flight of the Shadow (1891)

    34. Heather and Snow (1893)

    35. Lilith (1895)

    36. Salted With Fire (1897)

    37. Far Above Rubies (1898)

    The introductions to the 37 volumes form a continuous picture of George MacDonald’s literary life, viewed through the prism of the development of his written legacy of works. While each book can of course be read on its own, every introduction picks up where that to the previous volume left off, with special attention to the title under consideration. The introductions together, as a biography of MacDonald’s life as a writer, are compiled in Volume 38.

    38. George MacDonald A Writer’s Life

    CONTENTS

    Foreword to The Cullen Collection

    Introduction to Lilith by Michael Phillips

    1. The Library

    2. The Mirror

    3. The Raven

    4. Somewhere or Nowhere?

    5. The Old Church

    6. The Sexton’s Cottage

    7. The Cemetery

    8. My Father’s Manuscript

    9. I Repent

    10. The Bad Burrow

    11. The Evil Wood

    12. Friends and Foes

    13. The Little Ones

    14. A Crisis

    15. A Strange Hostess

    16. A Gruesome Dance

    17. A Grotesque Tragedy

    18. Dead or Alive?

    19. The White Leech

    20. Gone!—But How?

    21. The Fugitive Mother

    22. Bulika

    23. A Woman of Bulika

    24. The White Leopardess

    25. The Princess

    26. A Battle Royal

    27. The Silent Fountain

    28. I Am Silenced

    29. The Persian Cat

    30. Adam Explains

    31. The Sexton’s Old Horse

    32. The Lovers and the Bags

    33. Lona’s Narrative

    34. Preparation

    35. The Little Ones in Bulika

    36. Mother and Daughter

    37. The Shadow

    38. To the House of Bitterness

    39. That Night

    40. The House of Death

    41. I Am Sent

    42. I Sleep the Sleep

    43. The Dreams That Came

    44. The Waking

    45. Tue Journey Home

    46. The City

    47. The Endless Ending

    "Papa seems so quietly happy."

    —Louisa MacDonald, May 4, 1872, from Deskford (near Cullen)

    "Papa does enjoy this place so much."

    —Louisa MacDonald, May 6, 1872 from the Seafield Arms Hotel, Cullen

    "Papa oh! so jolly & bright & happy…Papa was taken for Lord Seafield yesterday."

    —Louisa MacDonald, Sept. 2, 1873, from Cullen

    "Papa is very poorly. He ought to go to Cullen for a week I think."

    —Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

    FOREWORD

    The Cullen Collection

    of the Fiction of George MacDonald

    The series name for these works of Scotsman George MacDonald (1824-1905) has its origins in the 1830s when the boy MacDonald formed what would be a lifelong affection for the northeast Scottish village of Cullen.

    The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, writing from Portsoy or Cullen, he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, as soon as possible. The broad white beach of Cullen Bay, the Seatown, the grounds of Cullen House, the temple of Psyche (Temple of the Winds), Cullen Burn, the dwellings along Grant Street, Scarnose, and especially Findlater Castle, all seized the youth’s imagination with a love that never left him. MacDonald continued to visit Huntly and Cullen throughout his life, using his childhood love for his homeland as the backdrop for his richest novels, including what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm, published in 1875.

    We therefore honor MacDonald’s unique relationship to Cullen with these newly updated editions of his novels. In Cullen, in certain respects more than in any other place, one finds the transcendent spirit of George MacDonald’s life and the ongoing legacy of his work still magically alive after a century and a half. This release of The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald coincides with a memorial bench and plaque established on Cullen’s Castle Hill commemorating MacDonald’s visits to the region.

    This series of new editions is an outgrowth and expansion of my series of edited MacDonald novels published by Bethany House in the 1980s. It includes many more titles and follows the same general priority of creating more readable editions that faithfully preserve the spirit, style, and flavor of MacDonald’s originals. Six of these newly added titles, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not, however, been edited, updated, or altered in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as first published. These six— Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, and are thus reproduced for The Cullen Collection with the same text by which they are generally known. *

    Dedicated followers of all great men and women continually seek hints that reveal their inner being—the true man, the true woman. What were they really like? What made him or her tick? Many biographies and studies attempt to answer such questions. In George MacDonald’s case, however, a panorama of windows exists that reveals far more about his person than the sum-total of everything that has been written about him over the years. Those are the novels that encompass his life’s work. The volumes of this series represent the true spiritual biography of the man, a far more important biography than life’s details can ever tell.

    In 1911, six years after his father’s death, George MacDonald’s son Ronald wrote of the man with whom he had spent his life:

    "The ideals of his didactic novels were the motive of his own life…a life of literal, and, which is more, imaginative consistency with his doctrine…There has probably never been a writer whose work was a better expression of his personal character. This I am not engaged to prove; but I very positively assert…that in his novels…and allegories…one encounters...the same rich imagination, the same generous lover of God and man, the same consistent practiser of his own preaching, the same tender charity to the sinner with the same uncompromising hostility to the sin, which were known in daily use and by his own people counted upon more surely than sunshine." *

    Thirty years after the publication of my one-volume biography George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, it now gives me great pleasure to present this thirty-seven-volume biography of the man, the Scotsman, the prophetic spiritual voice who is George MacDonald.

    How fitting is the original title in which Ronald MacDonald’s sketch of his father quoted above first appeared, From A Northern Window. For any attempted portrait of the man George MacDonald becomes at once a window into his homeland as well.

    Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the northern windows of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

    Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

    Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

    Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

    Or walk from Cullen’s Seatown alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

    Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay to Scarnose as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

    From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world. *

    Michael Phillips

    Cullen, Morayshire

    Scotland, 2017

    Image is a copy of George MacDonald’s bookplate, taken from an engraving by William Blake depicting an old man, stooped and bowed, entering the dark portal of death and emerging strong, youthful and vibrant. The letters of MacDonald’s name create the anagram Corage! God mend al! A more fitting symbolic image for Lilith can scarcely be imagined.

    INTRODUCTION

    Masterpiece or Confused Anticlimax

    After the completion of Heather and Snow in 1892, a single book loomed on the horizon for George MacDonald—one more culminating life-project to complete. It was the afterlife fantasy he had begun in 1890. Between then and the publication of Lilith in 1895, the book went through eight drafts, all significantly edited and revised. Much scholarly analysis surrounds these progressive drafts of the book, with diverse opinions about which of the earlier drafts may be the strongest. It is fascinating and somewhat disheartening to realize that most scholars agree that Lilith, as finally published, was not the most lucid, well-crafted, or most straightforward version of the work. Yet it is what posterity has left us. *

    Between late 1892 and 1894, MacDonald’s writing energies were almost solely devoted to the ongoing development of Lilith. Though this workload of going over and over a single book was light compared to previous years, it was also the most all-consuming project of his life, taxing him terribly, raising doubts and fears, and draining him of mental and physical energy.

    One familial note of almost unbelievable coincidental interest took place in 1894 as MacDonald was in the final throes of completing Lilith. His son Robert Falconer MacDonald married Mary St. Johnstone.*

    Of Lilith’s saga, Rolland Hein writes:

    "As the story evolved the process of completing it became increasingly exhausting. In the letters he wrote from the later part of the period he often spoke of being tired. He was always a meticulous workman, assiduously trying to achieve as great a perfection as he was able in his writing, and now, working on the final and crowning imaginative presentation of his vision, he worked even harder for a perfect completeness. ‘I am a little tired,’ he told Winifred during the summer of 1893, ‘having been hard at work cutting and killing and reembodying and shifting, and trying generally to restore order, and draw out hidden meanings from their holes.’ ¹

    "His doctors, fearing for the effects of the strain, limited him to working but four hours per day. When finally he sent the completed manuscript to the publishers, he was quite exhausted and did nothing for several months afterward…He was seized with a severe attack of influenza which so incapacitated him that the family spent the summer of 1894 in the mountains above Florence, where the temperature was reputed never to rise above eighty-two degrees.

    "When the proofs arrived that fall, he was able to slowly work through them. It was, he felt, the last book he would write. ‘I am working at the proofs of a book which I hope to send you by and by,’ he told Helen, ‘But the many touches necessary to finish it tire me much. I’m growin’ some auld!’ ²

    "He was also aware that his work might not be well received…

    His apprehension increased when Louisa read the manuscript. ³

    Greville takes up the story at that point, describing the chain of events both in his biography of his parents and in his own reminiscences:

    "When after four years he decided to publish it…he gave it to my mother to read. She, less brave than he in philosophic adventure, found the narrative often distressing, its hidden meaning too obscure; and she feared lest it should be taken as evidence of weakening power, rather than the reverse. Even though she agreed that often the poet must walk where angels fear to tread, she wrote of it to me as ‘a terrible book, though portions, such as the loveliness in death, and the grand ending are exquisitely beautiful’; and she could not be happy over its publication. For the first time in their married lives they were at variance. They then determined that I should adjudicate…and I read it greedily. So profoundly gripped was I…that, in writing of it to my mother, I declared that so far from its being my father’s last book, as he opined, it was his ‘veriest first of all, the Revelation of St. George the Divine.’…

    "Following up those words confessing his weariness I give part of another letter—to me a bit of a revelation no less than sacred in its humility.

    "‘Sept. 17, 1894

    "‘…I have been and am still going through a time of trial. That my book is not to be a success in the money way is not much of a trial…but the conscious failing—the doubt if I shall ever write another book—is a trial that stirs up other mental and spiritual trials, one being the great dread of becoming a burden…

    "‘Next Dec. I shall be 70…I believe all will be well anyhow…and I am glad at the thought of being so near Home now.’" ⁴

    Greville adds:

    My mother, though I do not think her mind had lost any of its elasticity, was troubled by the book’s strange imagery; her distress gave my father real heartache, so that he began to question his ability to utter his last urgent message. ⁵

    A remark in a letter of mid-1895 again reveals how thoroughly American publishers (in this case Dodd Mead, who had been involved with MacDonald since the mid-1870s) were an intrinsic part of his writing life. This is, of course, after the International Copyright Law went into effect. MacDonald wrote, My book is delayed by necessary arrangements with America, but will be out in September. ⁶

    Christopher MacDonald, whose help I have been privileged to rely on from time to time in this project, would probably have agreed with his great-great-grandmother, when at the age of nine, he first encountered Lilith on a mysterious shelf of dusty old books in his bedroom.

    Although they had always held a peculiar kind of fascination for me, he recalls, "almost a challenge, it was a lack of other reading material rather than bravery that finally caused me to take one of the volumes down. Luckily it was The Princess and the Goblin. I enjoyed the tale greatly, and a natural progression took me through The Princess and Curdie and At the Back of the North Wind. Sadly, my next choice was a disastrous one for a nine-year old: Lilith! After this, that particular shelf remained undisturbed for many years." ⁷

    Another letter from just prior to Lilith’s publication to MacDonald’s friend and publisher John Stuart Blackie echoes the very phrasing of the above-referenced letter from Greville, and is worth quoting at some length for what it reveals about MacDonald’s mental outlook and his deep love for his friends. This letter was clearly not written by a man losing either his mental power or his spiritual foundation.

    Bordighera

    November 11, 1894

    My loved and honoured old friend,

    I was glad to have your letter, and would have written sooner but have been much occupied…

    The shadows of the evening that precedes a lovelier morning are drawing down around us both. But our God is in the shadow as in the shine, and all is and will be well: have we not seen his glory in the face of Jesus? And do we not know him a little? Have we not found the antidote to the theology of men in the Lord himself? I may almost say I believe in nothing but in Jesus Christ, and I know that when life was hardest for him, he was still thoroughly content with his father, whom he knew perfectly, and to whom he has laboured and is labouring to make us know. We do know and we shall go on to know him. This life is a lovely school time, but I never was content with it. I look for better—oh, so far better! I think we do not yet know the joy of mere existence. To exist is to be a child of God; and to know it, to feel it, is to rejoice evermore. May the loving Father be near you and may you know it, and be perfectly at peace all the way into the home country, and to the palace home of the living one—the life of our life.

    Next month I shall be 70, and I am humbler a good deal than when I was 20. To be rid of self is to have the heart bare to God and to the neighbour—to have all life own, and possess all things. I see, in my mind’s eye, the little children clambering up to sit on the throne with Jesus. My God, art thou not as good as we are capable of imagining thee? Shall we dream a better goodness than thou hast ever thought of? Be thyself, and all is well with us.

    It may be that I shall be able to come and see you, if you are still within sight next summer. But the hand of age is upon me too. I can work only four hours a day, cannot, only I never could, walk much, and feel tired. But all is not only well, but on the way to be better…

    It seems to me that the antidote to party-spirit is Church history, and when the antidote itself has made you miserably ill, the cure is the gospel pure and simple—the story and words of Jesus. I care for no church but that of which every obedient disciple of the Lord, and no one else, is a member—though he may be—must be learning to become one. Good bye for a little while anyhow. I have loved you ever since I knew you, for you love the truth. Please give my love to your wife—from old time also.

    Yours always,

    George MacDonald. ⁸

    About what many consider MacDonald’s final masterpiece, there is little that can be added to what has been said dozens of times about Lilith by commentators, biographers, and analysts more qualified than myself to plumb its depths. Along with Phantastes, Lilith has over the years come to occupy a position almost of worship by many MacDonald enthusiasts which, in the view of this one student of MacDonald’s work, may be out of proportion alongside the bulk of his life’s work. As I said of Phantastes, I view Lilith as among the outer rings not at the bull’s eye of significance. It is much closer to the center than Phantastes, as clearly reflecting much about post-death purification which comprised such a focus of MacDonald’s message. Yet the confusion, even weirdness, of the literary vehicle, prevents the book from reaching its promise. It may be that in this case Louisa was right, it did indicate waning powers and lack of perspective. The fact that the final published version, by most accounts, is weaker and more confused than earlier drafts sadly confirms that MacDonald was not at the top of his game. What many view as divine inspiration I tend to see more as the effect of a tired mind, and occasionally disjointed and blurry senses. (In using the terms such as tired mind and blurry senses, I speak only of the effect of age on his fictional craft, not, as alluded to above, his keen and unwavering spiritual perspective and vision.)

    Though I am not a disciple in Lilith’s cult following, the underlying imagery of ultimate repentance, and of the divine compulsion that leads to it, I find so striking and powerful that I devoted an entire chapter to this aspect of Lilith in my book George MacDonald and the Late Great Hell Debate.

    Whatever one makes of the dark imagery that troubled Louisa so deeply, the spiritual implications of the worm that dieth not, that gives substance to MacDonald’s oft-used free-will conundrum that God has means to compel the free choice of repentance, cannot be ignored. It is here where the power of Lilith is most graphically evident. MacDonald probes to the very heart of what the final repentance of the unrepentant might look like—the mechanics of the divine compulsion to choose. Lilith gives eerie reality to many of the themes MacDonald raises in his sermon The Last Farthing.

    This essential heart of Lilith’s message—nothing more, nothing less than repentance, yielding to the will of God—is generally overlooked by most scholarly study of the book. That most analysis entirely misses the point of Lilith follows the pattern of H.G. Wells, a noted Darwinist and eugenicist (though reputedly a Christian early in life) who wrote enthusiastically to MacDonald, telling him that he was writing a book on the same idea. ⁹ Though it is likely, given his spiritual inclinations, that he had little notion what the central idea of Lilith even was. ¹⁰ This is sadly typical of many who idolize certain of MacDonald’s works—they have no idea what was the central driving vision of his life. They revere an image of their own imagination, not the true man George MacDonald at all.

    Lilith has many fascinating twists and turns of imaginative interest. Its many sub-plots, sub-themes, sub-messages can be forever analyzed and scrutinized through the microscope of literary intellectualism and the seven dimensions. But it simply has no other core message than repentance. ¹¹ That message indeed reprises much from MacDonald’s earlier novels and sermons. In that sense, it represents a climax, a coming-together, a fusing of the message of Falconer (It will be of use in hell), and The Consuming Fire and Justice and The Last Farthing (There are means of compelling you), and Donal Grant’s succinct but powerful:

    "He will set it right, my lord,—but probably in a way your lordship will not like. He is compelled to do terrible things sometimes."

    "Compelled!—what should compel him?"

    "The love that is in him, the love that he is. He cannot let us have our own way to the ruin of everything in us he cares for!"

    A brief excerpt from Lilith illuminates this core theme:

    "I will do as my Self pleases… I am my own…"

    "But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself…"

    "No one ever made me. I defy that Power…you shall not compel me to anything against my will!"

    "Such a compulsion would be without value. But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it…"

    "That light shall not enter me…"

    "I am sorry: you must suffer!"…

    A soundless presence as of roaring flame possessed the house…I turned to the hearth: its fire was a still small moveless glow. But I saw the worm-thing come creeping out, white-hot, vivid as incandescent silver, the live heart of essential fire. Along the floor it crawled…The shining thing crawled on to a bare bony foot…Slowly, very slowly, it crept along her robe until it reached her bosom, where it disappeared among the folds…

    At length, on the dry, parchment-like skin, began to appear drops as of the finest dew: in a moment they were as large as seed-pearls, ran together, and began to pour down in streams…The princess gave one writhing, contorted shudder, and I knew the worm was in her secret chamber…The horror in her face made me tremble lest her eyes should open, and the sight of them overwhelm me. Her bosom heaved and sank, but no breath issued. Her hair hung and dripped; then it stood out from her head and emitted sparks; again hung down, and poured the sweat of her torture on the floor…

    "You cannot go near her…She is far away from us, afar in the hell of her self-consciousness. The central fire of the universe is radiating into her the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of what she is. She sees at last the good she is not, the evil she is. She knows that she is herself the fire in which she is burning, but she does not know that the Light of Life is the heart of that fire. Her torment is that she is what she is. Do not fear for her; she is not forsaken. No gentler way to help her was left. Wait and watch."

    The strife of thought, accusing and excusing, began afresh, and gathered fierceness. The soul of Lilith lay naked to the torture of pure interpenetrating inward light…

    Gradually my soul grew aware of an invisible darkness, a something more terrible than aught that had yet made itself felt. A horrible Nothingness, a Negation positive infolded her; the border of its being that was yet no being, touched me, and for one ghastly instant I seemed alone with Death Absolute! It was not the absence of everything I felt, but the presence of Nothing…

    I looked, and saw: before her, cast from unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one what God had intended her to be, the other what she had made herself.

    Contemporary reviewers at the time were almost universal in their condemnation of Lilith. Rolland Hein comments:

    "The reviewers of Lilith…were generally mystified and dismayed. The writer in the Athenaeum, who professed to remember with fondness such characters as David Elginbrod and Robert Falconer, announced his confusion: ‘It is not less than grievous to find the sweet bells jangled, and the imagination, once lofty and penetrating, declined to the incoherent and grotesque.’ He stated he had earnestly tried to follow the narrative and enter into ‘the strange games with Adam and Eve, but ‘a regard for the preservation of sanity prevented us from dwelling on the shifting phases of nightmare’ of the story. ‘That some high purpose pervades this strange mystical farrago we are willing to believe,’ he concluded, ‘but its method of presentment seems to be neither lucid nor edifying.’ ¹²

    "Similarly, the reviewer in The Critic regretted having been led on ‘a wild goose chase from the Here into the Nowhere,’ and further complained he had never read a book ‘so full of striking resemblances to the works of other authors,’ professing to see parallels to Marie Corelli’s recently published Soul of Lilith ¹³… ¹⁴

    "In MacDonald’s day…Lilith was simply an aberration, an irritating enigma…The Pall Mall Gazette dismissed the book as ‘a wild phantasmagoria of nonsense.’" ¹⁵

    The general reaction to his fantasy no doubt prompted MacDonald to worry even more about the impairment of his abilities with age… ¹⁶

    I would hope my comments will dissuade no one from appreciating Lilith for what it is. My chief caution is that readers resist giving undo credence to the heightened analytical and intellectual adulation that can obscure many of MacDonald’s more important works. Seen for what it is, however, as one additional component of MacDonald’s legacy, we are free to enjoy and be fed by the depth of its multiple thematic elements. Lilith presents a unique literary prism, which diffuses the light of truth into our hearts in new and imaginative directions, and is a truly powerful book.

    Indeed, the well-worn copy in our home has markings and notations on almost every page from Judy’s and my readings, with numerous direct cross references to the Narnia books. If Narnia was born in the Princess and Curdie books, and Lewis’s inspiration for the wardrobe came from Phantastes’ cabinet opening into Fairy Land, many of Narnia’s more probing theological themes emerge straight out of Lilith. Notes highlighting where Lewis borrowed for The Great Divorce are well-represented in the margins of our copy of Lilith.

    In the same way that MacDonald was inspired by Novalis and others, Lewis and I have been inspired by MacDonald. My own Hell and Beyond and Heaven and Beyond are direct outgrowths of The Great Divorce and Lilith, which is why I dedicated both books to the two men.

    In his biography William Raeper spends considerable time in far more detailed scrutiny of Lilith than I care or am qualified to pursue, including one entire chapter and an additional appendix. I would point you to Chapter 32 of his George MacDonald. Rolland Hein contributes his analysis in Chapter 5 of his The Harmony Within.

    Though I withhold quite

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