Valued in his own time as an original thinker and spiritual guide, George MacDonald (1824-1905) continues to command the attention of today’s readers. But whereas the allure of his poems, sermons, novels, and essays has considerably faded, his fairy tales and longer fantasies such as At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin still fascinate. These fictions best dramatize MacDonald’s life-long distrust of ready-made systems and conventional assumptions—“adventitious wrappings” that he, like Thomas Carlyle, his fellow-Scot and mentor, set out to “re-tailorize.” Addressed to both children and adults, MacDonald’s fairy tales enlist paradox, play, and nonsense in a relentless process of destabilizing priorities he wants his readers to question and rethink. The possibilities offered by an elusive yet meaningful alternative order thus replace the dubious certitudes of everyday life.
Like Carlyle, or like his friends John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, with whom he shared the manuscript of “The Light Princess,” his first fairy tale for children and adults, MacDonald assumed the role of eccentric centrist or unconventional traditionalist so important in Victorian culture. Although his unorthodoxy repelled straight-laced parishioners and forced him to resign his pastorate before his thirtieth birthday, he soon attracted students at Bedford and King’s College in London and gradually gained a loyal reading public for his variegated writings. By the time of his 1872 lecture tour of the United States and Canada, he had acquired an international reputation. Invited to head a Boston congregation, MacDonald declined the highly lucrative offer, accepting instead, some years later, a modest pension granted by Queen Victoria to help the tubercular writer and his large family resettle in the healthier climate of Italy. Nonetheless several of his eleven children would die there, among them his gifted first-born and favorite, Lilia Scott MacDonald. Yet this latter-day Romantic seemed to thrive in his new surroundings: he continued to be sought out, as much as he had been in London, by a host of correspondents, friends and strangers, eager for advice, support, and emotional comfort. Only after the death of his wife and coworker, Louisa MacDonald, in 1902, three years before his own, did his intense literary productivity finally come to a halt.
Given the major position he occupied in the intellectual life of the Victorians, and given, too, the rhetorical sophistication of his best work, it seems strange that George MacDonald should have been denied a place in the canon of “sages” or “prophets” whose works are still taught in surveys of nineteenth-century literature. MacDonald moved in intellectual circles rather different from those occupied by Oxonians such as Matthew Arnold or John Henry Newman (or, for that matter, by his friends Ruskin and Carroll). Still, the man who began his literary career with a long philosophical poem called Within and Without had learned from Carlyle how to reach a great variety of constituents from his marginal position. Even though he remained unaffiliated with any one of the many sects and denominations “within and without” the Church of England, MacDonald’s “unspoken sermons” were as influential as if they had been delivered from an actual pulpit. His title for that series of scriptural commentaries and spiritual exhortations can, in a way, also act as a rubric for his many other forms of writing.
Ironically enough, however, the indifference shown by literary and intellectual historians may well be due to the endorsement of one of MacDonald’s staunchest twentieth-century disciples, C. S. Lewis. Lewis rightly hailed MacDonald as a master in the “art of mythmaking,” whose best work was done in a fantastical mode “that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic.” Yet Lewis also acknowledged his own investment in MacDonald as “a Christian teacher” and “not as a writer”: the “wisdom” and “holiness” of his thought could be preserved through extracts distilled, not from “great works” of fantasy that stood on their own, but rather from MacDonald’s sermons and minor novels. As a result, the “great works” remained just as unanalyzed as those lesser ones whose “means of communication” Lewis dismissed; indeed, MacDonald’s profoundly experimental and intertextual fairy tales and fantasies, his subversive incursions into so many different nineteenth-century literary forms, and his delight in the frictions and contradictions he could produce through his generic crisscrossings, went unnoted.
The approach towards “fairy-stories” taken by J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis’s contemporary and associate, gives greater credit to Mac-Donald’s craftsmanship. Tolkien contends that all successful tellers of fantasies rely on what he calls the “three faces” of “Faërie.” Of these three, the “Magical” face which confronts a primordial, often inexplicable “Nature,” Tolkien insists, is central and hence more important than the faces turned towards a “Supernatural” order we may worship or towards a humanity we may pity or scorn. Tolkien applauds MacDonald for maintaining this priority. He finds the parabolic art of shorter “stories of power and beauty” such as “The Golden Key” to be superior to the allegorical mode of Lilith (the late MacDonald romance from which Lewis drew inspiration for his Narnia books). Tolkien’s implication that MacDonald’s “Magical” fairy tales best carry out the writer’s lifelong effort to make his art “a vehicle of Mystery” seems essentially correct.
When Tolkien questions, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” whether it is true “that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories,” he returns to a subject that MacDonald had fully broached in his important 1893 essay “The Fantastic Imagination” (reprinted below as a prelude to the fairy tales collected in this edition). The stance taken by the two writers is remarkably similar. Both rather sardonically denounce the notion, still prevalent in our own times, that a childhood associated with purity, innocence, and fairy-tale “wonder” ought to be segregated from adult skepticism and disbelief. Such an arbitrary division, for both men, is condescending to child and grownup alike.
In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald exploits the unease of a putative reader who confesses his inability to come up with the “meaning” of fairy tales like “The Light Princess” and “The Golden Key.” When such a reader worries that he might pass on his own confusion to the child he is expected to guide, MacDonald coyly suggests that this insecurity may itself be instructive: “If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so?…A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean…. It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning.” Indeed, MacDonald proposes that children are far more comfortable with unsettled meanings than their adult counterparts; they possess something like a Keatsian “negative capability” that allows them to keep contraries in suspension without feeling compelled to come up with a singular “right” answer. Instead of demanding hierarchies of meaning, children not only are willing to entertain multiple perspectives, but actually can find great delight in the yoking of irreconcilables. They are therefore attracted to puns and homonyms, and to the instability of representations of the porous “borders” which MacDonald uses as a setting for so many of his fairy tales—narratives that are at once serious and playful, grave and light.
MacDonald therefore invites his adult readers to adopt the same elasticity and open-mindedness that come so naturally to the child: “But indeed your children are not likely to trouble you about the meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be too much. For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” MacDonald here insists on something that Tolkien—equally outraged at late-Victorian transformations of stark and unsentimental myths into prettified tales—would forcefully reiterate, in the wake of yet more texts featuring miniature flower-fairies and ever-boyish Peter Pans. Fairy tales, both men insist, should not be relegated to the nursery; they are intended for adults as much as for children, whose fully active imaginations require less “waking” of dormant meanings.
Although MacDonald wanted all of the fairy tales he published from 1864 to 1879 to reach a dual readership, it seems significant that his very first incursion into the realm of “Faërie” should have been undertaken in a romance he had exclusively designed for adults. The 1858 Phantastes, which bore the subtitle, A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, follows the precedent of the kunstmärchen written by German Romantics such as Novalis, Tieck, and Hoffmann (as well as of Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Shelley’s Alastor), in presenting a hazy dreamworld as an alternative to everyday reality. The questing herodreamer, a young man called Anodos, must quickly forsake the limited constructions of reality he has inherited from his dead father or from the uncle who has raised him. Like the male reader of “The Fantastic Imagination,” he must be “wakened” into a new awareness.
Taking possession of his father’s keys on his twenty-first birthday, Anodos unlocks a desk which contains, not the expected “records of lands and money” passed on by generations of men, but a tiny “woman-form” whom he patronizes by treating her as if she were a child. Yet when she abruptly changes her size and stands before him as “a tall, gracious lady,” he finds her beauty so “irresistible” that he steps forward to embrace her, only to be sharply rebuked: “Foolish boy, if you could touch me, I should hurt you. Besides, I was two hundred-thirty-seven years old last Midsummer-eve; and a man must not fall in love with his grandmother, you know.” When Anodos protests that this youthful charmer could hardly be so ancient, she archly mocks his ignorance about a matrilineal past that MacDonald links here, as elsewhere, to a higher imagination: “I dare say you know something of your greatgrandfathers a good deal further back than that; but you know very little about your greatgrandmothers on either side.” He needs, moreover, to become acquainted with a “fairy-country” his little sister still cherishes. It is into the often confusing topography of that feminine region that the clueless Anodos (whose name means “pathless”) will now be carried in order to become reschooled.
The opening scene of Phantastes reads like a blueprint for materials that MacDonald would refine in the fairy tales he soon began to test out on his own growing children as well as on his students and acquaintances. Magical women such as Anodos’s guide predominate in these tales (as well as in longer fantasy-novels such as At the Back of the North Wind or the The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie). Whether mortal or immortal, fairies or sorceresses, these figures are endowed with extraordinary powers. They can be nurturant, like the mysterious lady whom the girl Tangle fondly addresses as “my grandmother” in “The Golden Key,” or harsh and punitive, like the stern justicer who supervises the painful schooling of Princess Rosamond in “The Wise Woman, or the Lost Princess.” They can even be demonic, like the wolfish witch Watho in “The History of Photogen and Nycteris,” or vindictive, like Princess Makemnoit in “The Light Princess.” But even in her most unsavory incarnations, this potent figure is enlisted to reshape youngsters who might otherwise grow up into adults as bland and incomplete as their satirized elders. And her magical powers, though willingly or unwillingly placed in the service of an esoteric order ruled by a divine Christ-child, are essentially pagan, harking back to traditions of nature-myths and folklore rather than relying on the formulations of organized religion.
The character of Anodos, too, would soon be replicated in the fairy tales that MacDonald composed in the 1860s and 1870s. But whereas the hero of Phantastes was treated as a “boy” by his fairy grandmother and had to be reminded of his inferiority to an imaginative little sister, the child-protagonists whom MacDonald features in his fairy tales are interdependent boys and girls who jointly travel into the unknown (as do Tricksie Wee and Buffy Bob in “The Giant’s Heart,” for example, or Richard and Alice in “Cross Purposes”). Though separated, children who develop into adults over the course of such stories as “The Golden Key” or “Photogen and Nycteris,” continue to be steadily juxtaposed, treated as incomplete halves of a single, bi-gendered psyche that requires their eventual integration. Like the childish princes and princesses in “The Light Princess” and “Little Daylight,” these male and female figures must rely on each other’s support in overcoming whatever impedes their development into mature men and women. Even Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind, an androgynous boy who will never grow up into a man, is presented as a self-sufficient foil for his abused counterpart, the street-sweeper Nanny.
MacDonald’s conviction that childhood could act as a conduit for the same sort of metaphysical quest he had undertaken in adult romances such as Phantastes stemmed from his firm belief in a trans-generational audience of “the childlike.” By relying on child-protagonists and child-readers, he felt, he might help grownup readers shed their acquired dependence on linear time and dissolve their sense of spatial constraints. Since books for middle-class children were read as much by an adult as by a juvenile audience, MacDonald hoped that the burgeoning market for children’s books would enable him to carry out his agenda. Just as he tried to create coexistent temporal orders and to blur sexual binaries, so did he endeavor to reach and “retailor” a composite reader who was simultaneously young and old. But this ambitious program was not easy to execute. For the divisions MacDonald tried to erase were, of course, already firmly implanted in the literary marketplace.
MacDonald’s first entry into the field of children’s fiction, “The Light Princess,” ran afoul of the cultural assumptions the story so wittily challenged. For the Victorians, the tendency to segregate childhood “innocence” from adult “experience” was too entrenched to admit questioning or reconstruction. MacDonald’s reliance on child-texts to enact a decidedly adult search for meaning was in itself problematic: publishers wondered, perhaps not all that unreasonably, whether “The Light Princess” might appeal to child readers, let alone be fully understood by them. But even more controversial was the story’s blatant disregard of the Victorian pieties that insisted that small children—and, especially, girls—were to be considered as asexual, and hence to be screened from adult erotics. Ruskin, though otherwise sympathetic to MacDonald’s objectives, questioned his friend’s depiction of the undeniable sexual attraction between the swimming prince and princess in “The Light Princess.” The “swimming scenes and love scenes,” he assured MacDonald, “would be to many children seriously harmful.” When MacDonald started to peddle the manuscript of “The Light Princess” in 1862, not even Arthur Hughes’s “exquisite drawings” (as Lewis Carroll called them) helped to attract a single London publisher.
Although “The Light Princess” was eventually published in 1864, it appeared as one of a dozen interpolations (with “The Shadows” and “The Giant’s Heart”) in an adult novel called Adela Cathcart. There, the fairy tale that would later be printed (and so often reprinted) in its own right, is told by an elderly narrator called John Smith as his first contribution to a story-telling group convened to cure his niece Adela from a crisis of disbelief. Twenty-one (like Anodos) and hence at the threshold of adult life, the young woman must be rescued from giving in to a death-wish caused by her inability to find meaning or emotional sustenance in the denuded world around her. Hovering between adolescence and a womanhood she resists, Adela is an ideal audience for MacDonald’s purposes. Like the Light Princess herself, she must be encouraged to grow up. At the same time, however, Adela must continue to challenge the adult limitations embodied in characters such as her literal-minded aunt, Mrs. Cathcart.
Like “The Fantastic Imagination,” Adela Cathcart relies on the interplay between puzzled readers and a playfully elliptical entertainer. MacDonald delegates his own authorial role to the teasing John Smith, the book’s narrator. Eager to provoke his audience through his indirections and evasions, Mr. Smith promises to tell something “suitable” for the Christmas season, “a child’s story,—a fairy-tale, namely; though I confess I think it fitter for grown than for young children.” When Mrs. Cathcart frowns at his choice of such pagan fare “at a sacred time like this,” Mr. Smith only adds more fuel:
“If I thought that God did not approve of fairy-tales, I would never read, not to say write, one, Sunday or Saturday. Would you, madam?”
“I never do.”
“I feared not. But I must begin, notwithstanding.”
Yet the loquacious Mr. Smith does not begin his narrative after announcing its title. Instead, he promptly adds a “Second Title: “A FAIRY-TALE WITHOUT FAIRIES,” and, then, to boot, provides a cryptic epigraph or “motto” he has taken from Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison: “Your Servant, Goody Gravity.” Mrs. Cathcart acknowledges her honest befuddlement: “I must be very stupid, I fear, Mr. Smith; but, to tell the truth, I can’t make head or tail of it.” Her confusion plays into Mr. Smith’s hands. Since his story about the “lightness” of a gravity-less heroine has not yet begun, he can hardly expect any auditor to make sense of the “motto” he has produced, or, for that matter, to grasp exactly why a narrative he has just defended as a “fairy-tale” should now be called a “fairy-tale without fairies.” The story, after all, will feature a slighted sorceress who revenges herself at a christening by casting a powerful spell on a levitating infant. Since Makemnoit clearly enacts the traditional part played by the uninvited fairy in “Sleeping Beauty” (a role to which MacDonald will give still another comic twist in his later “Little Daylight”), how can this fairy tale be presumed to feature no fairies?
Is Mr. Smith—and George MacDonald behind him—simply making a dubious distinction between a “witch” and a wicked fairy? Or is he signifying his detachment from fairy-tale conventions by suggesting that we ought not to misread his original fable as a mere adaptation of Perrault? Whether a fairy or a witch, the self-taught Princess Makemnoit, we soon discover, prizes her radical difference from all magical foremothers: she “despised all the modes we read of in history, in which offended fairies and witches have taken their revenges.” And if, by proudly practicing a magic that is her very own, Makemnoit devises subversive tactics that are impeccably original, so does her creator want us to know that he, too, has invented totally new narrative stratagems.
Having offered two titles for “The Light Princess,” Mr. Smith easily comes up with an alternative for the epigraph that mystified Mrs. Cathcart by substituting “a more general, and indeed a more applicable, motto for my story.” But that new motto, from Milton, refers, not to the tale’s content or subject matter, but rather to its narrative mode: “Great bards besides / In sage and solemn times have sung / Of tourneys and of trophies hung; / Of forests and enchantments drear, / Where more is meant than meets the ear.” Adopting the tone of a professorial MacDonald lecturing to his Bedford College students, Mr. Smith explains: “Milton here refers to Spenser in particular, most likely. But what distinguishes the true bard is that more is meant than meets the ear; and, although I am no bard, I should scorn to write anything that only spoke to the ear, which signifies the surface understanding.”
Through the mask of “Mr. Smith,” MacDonald here tries to encourage his own readership to distrust surfaces he always tries to ruffle. Mr. Smith’s procedure is soon endorsed by one of his listeners (significantly enough, a clergyman), who applauds the possibilities of a narrative he cannot yet presume to decode:” ‘Bravo! Mr. Smith,’ cried the clergyman. ‘A good beginning, I am sure; for I cannot see what you are driving at.’” Indeed, this unconventional clergyman (as much an incarnation of MacDonald as the story-teller) even aligns himself with Mr. Smith against the pietism of Mrs. Cathcart:
“One thing,” said Mrs. Cathcart, with a smile, not a very sweet one, but still a smile,—“one thing I must object to. That is, introducing church ceremonies into a fairy-tale.”
“Why, Mrs. Cathcart,” answered the clergyman, taking up the cudgels for me, “do you suppose the church to be such a cross-grained old lady that she will not allow her children to take a few gentle liberties with their mother? She’s able to stand that surely. They won’t love her the less for that.”
“Besides,” I ventured to say, “if both church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles without injury to either. They must have something in common. There is the ‘Fairy Queen,’ and the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ you know, Mrs. Cathcart. I can fancy the pope telling his nephews a fairy-tale.”
“The Light Princess” mixes a carnivalesque levity that relies on picaresque absurdism, parody, and extended punning, with a spiritual seriousness that befits Protestant symbolists such as Spenser, Bunyan, or Richardson. But that mix also creates deliberate tonal discordancies between the story’s two halves, and produces a texture that clashes with the mode of Mr. Smith’s next two stories, “The Shadows” and “The Giant’s Heart,” which, in turn, are generically quite different from each other. Indeed, Mr. Smith’s auditors rightly question the uniformity of the term “fairy-tale” that he seems to apply so indiscriminately to each of his three discrepant offerings.
When at the start of “The Shadows,” Mr. Smith introduces Ralph Rinkelmann, an ill old artist who is about to be “chosen king of the fairies,” Adela demurs by reminding her uncle that he had promised not to tell another fairy tale. He dismisses her objection: “Well, I don’t think you will call it one, when you have heard it…. But I am not particular as to names. The fairies have not much to do with it.” Despite his defensiveness, Mr. Smith has a point: the nomenclature of “fairy tale” acts as a mere umbrella for his ventures into the uncanny. His strange story about a world of shadows will, as a pensive Adela concludes, feature “mysteries in the midst of mystery.” Although the tale ends by idealizing a little girl whose love allows her grandfather to come to terms with his mortality, it is even less of a children’s story than “The Light Princess.”
To regain the adult audiences that folk and fairy tales had commanded for such a long time before Perrault and the Grimms domesticated them into fare for middle- and upper-class juveniles was clearly one of George MacDonald’s primary goals. But he also wanted to retain the appeal of such stories for alert and well-educated young readers of the Victorian bourgeoisie, intelligent children like his very own. MacDonald’s inability to market “The Light Princess” as a children’s book had forced him to recognize that his generic deformations might well seem too extreme for such a youthful audience. Accordingly, he has a conciliatory Mr. Smith offer what that gentleman calls “only a child’s story” as his third and last contribution to the story-telling sessions in Adela Cathcart. Eager, as always, to test the responses of different listeners, Mr. Smith insists on expanding the group’s membership. Finding it “absurd to read” his story “without the presence of little children,” he asks Adela to invite a representative sampling for “a share in what is going on.”
The children whom Adela gathers—“a merry, pretty company of boys and girls, none older, or at least looking older than twelve”—prove to be quite discriminating, with distinctive individual tastes. When a “scornful little girl” professes herself to be “tired of wicked fairies,” presumably sated by “stupid” repetitions of the selfsame plot, a “priggish” boy demands a tale about a “good giant, then,” giving Mr. Smith an opportunity for introducing “The Giant’s Heart,” a tale he has already written: “I am afraid I could not tell you a story about a good giant; for, unfortunately, all the good giants I ever heard of were very stupid; so stupid that a story would not make itself about them; so stupid, indeed, that they were always made game of by creatures not half so big or half so good, and I don’t like such stories. Shall I tell you about [a] wicked giant…?”
As usual, MacDonald here slyly introduces “more than meets the ear.” First of all, he implicitly raises questions about the tale’s status. Is Mr. Smith simply relaying an oft-told story, as he implies when he pleads that there is no precedent for stories about good giants? Or is the text, once again, largely his own invention? “The Light Princess” was set in an aristocratic world of kings, queens, princes, and princesses, while “The Shadows” moved down a notch by enlisting a middle-class hero. By now featuring the children of a common rural “laborer” for its protagonists, “The Giant’s Heart” tries to pass for a primordial folktale. But Mr. Smith soon gives the game away. Challenged by one of the children, he denies that he has made up the story himself, indignantly insisting—clearly with tongue-in-cheek—that its plot has been unalterably fixed ever since it “was written in the chronicles of Giantland long before one of us was born.”
Equally important, however, is the moral ambiguity that MacDonald introduces when he has Mr. Smith claim that his repertoire is limited to stories about “wicked” giants. Since the giant in the story will later be called “stupid” and be bested by creatures “not half so big,” should he not, after all, be grouped among those giants who are “good”? And, if so, are the children who outwit him by taking possession of his heart only “half” as good as he is? As Roderick McGillis has convincingly shown, “The Giant’s Heart” complicates the binaries we expect to find when a villainous ogre is defeated by a pair of heroic children. Are the sadistic Tricksy-Wee and Buffy-Bob truly the superiors of a placid, happily married pair of giants? And is not the giant Thunderthump whom his adoring wife defends as a “good man” actually more childish than the clever children who cause him such excruciating pain? McGillis’s summary nicely captures the story’s indeterminacy: “Although this story, like all stories, keeps some secrets to itself, it also shares others with its various readers. Those readers, both child and adult, will take from the story what they will; some will find the story either repellent or puzzling, others will find it comic and liberating. Only equals may laugh, and the child and adult who laugh at the histrionics of Thunderthump are equals.”
By reproducing in great detail the varied responses from the children in Mr. Smith’s audience—some of whom find “The Giant’s Heart” to be “fun” while others pronounce it to be a “horrid story”—MacDonald seems to acknowledge that not every reader will relish this or any other of his elliptical fairy tales. But by dramatizing the children’s ability to come up with so many different and even contrary perspectives, he conveys his belief in narratives that playfully defy our preexisting notions about reality, and, therefore, also challenge the preexisting aesthetic or moral categories to which we so often cling. According to Greville MacDonald, the writer’s son, it was precisely a capacity for witty questioning which his ordinarily grave father so cherished in Lewis Carroll that he “could laugh till tears ran down at his friend’s ridicule of smug formalism and copy-book maxims.”
If Carroll’s publication in 1865 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland owed much to the entire MacDonald family’s sympathetic encouragement of his original manuscript, George MacDonald greatly profited from the success of his friend’s masterpiece. The resistance which “The Light Princess” had met from the publishers of children’s fiction dissipated after Alice proved that daring and experimental fantasies could have a place in Victorian nurseries. In 1867, two years after the appearance of Alice and three years after Adela Cathcart, MacDonald published his first book for children, Dealings with the Fairies. In it, he stripped away Mr. Smith’s frames for “The Light Princess,” “The Shadows,” and “The Giant’s Heart,” and added “Cross Purposes” and “The Golden Key,” two new stories. In a brief preface, signed “YOUR PAPA,” he addressed his own children, reminding them that they had already read all stories “except the last,” but promising them that if “plenty of children like this volume, you shall have another soon.”
Since enough children liked the collection, MacDonald was more than true to his promise. He turned to longer children’s fantasies in At the Back of the North Wind (serialized from 1868 to 1869, and published in book form in 1871), The Princess and the Goblin (serialized from 1870 to 1871, and published in 1872), The Wise Woman, later renamed The Lost Princess (serialized in 1874-75), and The Princess and Curdie (serialized in 1877). During this period, he also became the editor of Good Words for the Young (later renamed Good Things), a children’s magazine to which he contributed the serial installments of these and other, more realistic, fictions.
MacDonald’s fairy tales can, at their best, tantalize us as powerfully as the most enigmatic parables of Kafka or Borges. Despite C. S. Lewis’s notion of MacDonald as a “teacher” able to guide a perplexed modernity towards unambiguous spiritual truths, he resembles those modern symbolists for whom the very instability of interpretation provided a fertile source of meaning. His very best stories operate within a new space, a borderland in which old certitudes must be dismantled before they can be reinvigorated. Fuelled by energies that tap the simplicity of innocence as much as the sophistication of experience, MacDonald’s fairy tales dramatize a struggle for endurance, a permanence that can only be achieved through full immersion into uncertainty and flux. And, by involving new generations of the “childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five,” these original and resilient stories will themselves continue to endure.
The present edition contains all of MacDonald’s shorter fairy tales, thus offering a sequence that moves from the 1867 versions of the three Adela Cathcart tales to the 1879 “The History of Photogen and Nycteris.” It departs from other such collections, including Greville MacDonald’s much-reprinted 1904 compilation of eight fairy tales, by chronologically situating each cluster of tales in separate sections introduced by descriptive headlinks. This attention to MacDonald’s fifteen-year development of the fairy-tale form he had first used in the 1864 “The Light Princess” is in itself new, but the edition also differs significantly from all others in four additional ways. (1) It includes “The Wise Woman, or the Lost Princess: A Double Story,” a work that other single-volume editions exclude because of its bulky, novella-like, length. (2) It reproduces, in the notes, some of the interactions between Mr. Smith and the readers who persistently interrupt his story-telling in Adela Cathcart. (3) It restores the narrative frame for “Little Daylight,” a fairy tale told by Mr. Raymond (a Smith-like narrator) in At the Back of the North Wind to another group of children. (4) It pairs “Little Daylight” with slightly abridged versions of the fairy-tale dreams of two of Mr. Raymond’s child-listeners, the girl Nanny and the boy Diamond, for reasons which the headlink to that section should make apparent.
U. C. KNOEPFLMACH
Princeton
August 1998