He produced a large number of books through his life and was a friend of writers as various as Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. He eventually settled into teaching at London University and writing. He rejected the concept of divine punishment, arguing instead that God’s only concern was to cure sinners, and believed that everyone would ultimately be saved. MacDonald’s theology was liberal, possibly influenced by some of the less conventional Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen. He studied at the University of Aberdeen and in 1850 became a Congregational minister, first in Arundel, then Manchester, but neither he nor his congregations were comfortable with one another.
MacDonald was born in 1824 in Scotland, descended from the MacDonalds of Glencoe, victims of the notorious massacre in 1692. Many of his books were realistic, but he wrote a string of fantasy tales aimed variously at adults and children, though he himself described his target audience as “ the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” His children’s fairy stories, such as The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind, have remained popular, but his writing career was bookended by two major fantasy novels for adults: Phantastes and Lilith. Perhaps the most important immediate precursor of modern fantasy was the Scottish minister, poet, novelist and essayist George MacDonald. Still, it was Morris’s romantic adventures, set in a world of long-ago that doesn’t line up with real history, that led both to the American pulp fantasy of the 1930s and 1940s (Howard, Leiber and the rest), as well as to a succession of more idiosyncratic fantasy novelists, culminating in the quantum leap of Lord of the Rings and everything that came afterwards. This is an oversimplification, since, in a sense, fantasy goes back at least as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh, written down around 2000 BC. It’s been widely argued (for example, by Lin Carter in Imaginary Worlds) that fantasy literature as we know it today began in the 1890s with William Morris’s romances, such as The Well at the World’s End.
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