The Wood Beyond the World (1894). William Morris was an amazing man. Among his many accomplishments, he was a designer of architecture and home furnishings (the Morris chair is still made today, and his wallpaper designs are still extremely popular), a painter (he was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), a pioneer socialist, a designer of type fonts, an illustrator, a translator, and a writer. It is in this later capacity that he produced the first great fantasy novel employing an invented world, constructed from his own imagination. It was, I think, Morris’s outright rejection of the burgeoning industrial revolution that was so rapidly reshaping the English cities and landscapes around him that led him to develop a “fresh scrubbed world, done up in the bright, timeless light of Medieval tapestries” amid high castles and lush landscapes, through which his heroes move calmly in adventure after epic adventure. To enjoy any of Morris’s novels, you are forced to put aside the rushing to and fro of modern life and relax into his lyrically described worlds of long ago and far away.

—Charles Vess.