The Marquis of Lossie

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

A gothic novel of romance, danger, and deception—the sequel to the acclaimed Malcolm from the 19th-century Scottish literary master.
 
This 1877 sequel to Malcolm begins where the first volume of the doublet left off, at Lossie House in Cullen’s fictionalized Portlossie. Soon thereafter Malcolm travels to London to rescue Florimel from the harmful influences of duplicitous friends who do not have her best interests in mind. Kidnapping her out of London, Malcolm’s and Florimel’s return to the north coast of Scotland brings to a stirring climax the divergent threads of mystery and intrigue woven through this triumphant literary tapestry. It is a classic Victorian romance, complete with rogues, inheritances, castles, and of course true love. Of The Marquis of Lossie, Michael Phillips says, “Escaping a common pitfall of sequels not measuring up to the level of excellence of their predecessor, MacDonald crafts an equally engaging, and in some ways an even heightened dramatic crescendo to Malcolm’s story. With the setting so altered, this is a spectacular creative achievement.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795352089

George MacDonald

George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet. He grew up in a religious home influenced by various sects of Christianity. He attended University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and physics. After experiencing a crisis of faith, he began theological training and became minister of Trinity Congregational Church. Later, he gained success as a writer penning fantasy tales such as Lilith, The Light Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. MacDonald became a well-known lecturer and mentor to various creatives including Lewis Carroll who famously wrote, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame.

Book preview

Marquis of Lossie

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): 978-0-7953-5208-9

www.RosettaBooks.com

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

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

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

CONTENTS

Foreword to The Cullen Collection

Introduction to The Marquis of Lossie

NOTE: As the introductions to the 37 volumes of The Cullen Collection form a continuous portrait of George MacDonald’s life, and as many of the introductions contain comprehensive and detailed discussion and analysis of the title in question—its plot, themes, and circumstances of writing—some first-time readers may choose to skip ahead to the story itself, saving the introduction for later, so as not to spoil the story.

1. The Stable Yard

2. The Library

3. Miss Horn

4. Lizzy Findlay

5. Blue Peter

6. To London

7. The Streets of London

8. Unsought Reunion

9. The Painter

10. Portlossie

11. Lord Liftore

12. Kelpie in London

13. Mr. Graham

14. Richmond Park

15. Painter and Groom

16. A Lady

17. Davy

18. The Portrait

19. An Evil Pass

20. A Quarrel

21. The Two Daimons

22. Confrontation

23. An Old Adversary

24. An Innocent Plot

25. The Journey

26. Discipline

27. Moonlight

28. St. Ronan’s Well

29. Perplexities

30. The Mind of the Author

31. The Ride Home

32. Portland Place

33. Portlossie and Scaurnose

34. The Potion

35. The Demoness at Bay

36. The Psyche

37. Nightfall at Sea

38. Hope Chapel

39. A New Pupil

40. The Wanderer

41. Mid Ocean

42. The Piper

43. The Shore

44. The Trench

45. The Peacemaker

46. An Offering

47. Awakening

48. The Dune

49. Confession of Sin

50. A Visit to the Seaton

51. Eve of the Crisis

52. Sea

53. Hearts as One

54. The Crew of the Bonnie Annie

55. Lizzy’s Baby

56. The Disclosure

57. Arrival

58. The Assembly

59. Knotted Strands

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.

To those readers familiar with my previous editions of MacDonald’s novels, I should make clear that eighteen of the volumes in this new series (including this one) are updated and expanded titles from the Bethany House series of the 1980s. Limitations of length dictated much about how those previous volumes were produced. To interest a publisher in the project during those years when MacDonald was a virtual unknown in the publishing world, certain sacrifices had to be made. Cuts to length had to be more severe than I would have preferred. Practicality drove the effort.

Added to that was the challenge of working with editors who occasionally changed MacDonald’s wording and removed more than I intended, then also sometimes took liberties to the opposite extreme by inserting words, sentences, even whole paragraphs that originated from neither myself nor MacDonald. Those editions were also subject to sanitizing editorial scrutiny, which occasionally removed aspects of MacDonald’s more controversial perspectives, and added evangelically correct words and phrases to bring the text more in line with accepted orthodoxy. As MacDonald himself knew, there are times an author has little say in details of final text, design, art, or overall quality. Thus, the covers and titles were not mine. And I was often kept in the dark about internal textual changes and was unable to correct them. Yet, too, many of MacDonald’s expansive perspectives were preserved (though what was excised and what was left often seemed random and inconsistent) for which I applaud Bethany’s openness. Their publications of the 1980s helped inaugurate a worldwide renaissance of interest in MacDonald and we owe them our gratitude. Frustrating as the process occasionally was, I thus remain enormously grateful for those editions. They were wonderful door-openers for many thousands into MacDonald’s world.

Hopefully this new and more comprehensive set of MacDonald’s fiction will take up where they left off. Not constrained by the limitations that dictated production of the former volumes, these new editions, though identical at many points, have been expanded—sometimes significantly. In that sense they reflect MacDonald’s originals somewhat more closely, while still preserving the flavor, pace, and readability of their predecessors. Needless to say, the doctrinal scrubbings have been corrected and the deleted passages reinstated. Nineteen additional titles have been added. The thirteen realistic novels among these have been updated according to the same priorities that guided the earlier Bethany House series. That process will be explained in more detail in the introductions to the books of the series. The final six, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not been edited in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as they were first published. These six titles—Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—are so well known and have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, that it has seemed best to reproduce them for The Cullen Collection with the same texts 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 up from Cullen’s Seatown in your mind’s eye 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 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

Special Acknowledgment

A final word is especially fitting for the new editions of Malcolm and The Marquis of Lossie.

Cullen’s memorial George MacDonald bench owes a heartfelt word of gratitude to three men. The entire Castle Hill project—reclaiming the inaccessible and nearly forgotten historic site from both gorse and forgetfulness—has been their visionary brainchild, and owes thousands of hours of very hard work (literally through rain, wind, sleet, and snow) to Dennis Paterson, Barry Addison, and Stan Slater.

All Cullen, and all lovers of George MacDonald, owe them (and their many co-labourers) profound appreciation. They have contributed, as have many through the years, in yet one more way of keeping the history of Cullen, and the legacy of George MacDonald, vibrant and alive for future generations.

INTRODUCTION

True Brotherhood

Most readers of George MacDonald’s Cullen doublet will have previously read Malcolm, to which The Marquis of Lossie is a sequel. As is clear from that first book, the reality of place is palpable on every page. To walk the streets of Cullen, even 150 years later, is to step back into the story’s Portlossie. *

As this second volume of the story begins, once more we find ourselves in the former fishing village of northeast Scotland as if no time has passed. Walking up Cullen’s Grant Street, at the top of the hill one passes through the black iron gates to begin the half mile walk to Cullen House. Those with a heart to feel it, immediately sense themselves stepping back in time as they are drawn inexorably into George MacDonald’s fictional world. Leaving the gates and houses of Grant Street behind, quiet descends as we continue, described in Malcolm, along—

a winding carriage drive, through trees whose growth was stunted by the sea winds, Malcolm made a slow descent, yet was soon shadowed by timber of a more prosperous growth, rising as from a lake of the loveliest green, spangled with starry daisies. The air was full of sweet odours uplifted with the ascending dew, and trembled with a hundred songs at once, for here was a very paradise for birds.

At length he came in sight of a long low wing of the house…

Pausing, a glance to the left reveals the one-time stables of Cullen House attached to what was formerly the factor’s house (now residence of the earl of Seafield since Cullen House itself passed into private hands in the 1980s). These former stables are now garages, the courtyard of which is paved with rough cobblestones. Above the central building of these hangs an ancient clock, its hands now stilled but reminding us of the man who immortalized this precise spot in opening The Marquis of Lossie with the vivid description:

It was one of those exquisite days that come in every winter, in which it seems no longer the dead body, but the lovely ghost of summer. Such a day bears to its sister of the happier time something of the relation the marble statue bears to the living form. It lifts the soul into a higher region than will summer day of lordliest splendour. It is like the love that loss has purified.

Such, however, were not the thoughts that at the moment occupied the mind of Malcolm Colonsay. Indeed, the loveliness of the morning was but partially visible from the spot where he stood—the stable yard of Lossie House, ancient and roughly paved. It was a hundred years since the stones had been last relaid and levelled. None of the horses of the late Marquis minded it but one—her whom the young man in Highland dress was now grooming—and she would have fidgeted had it been an oak floor. The yard was a long and wide space, with two storied buildings on all sides of it. In the center of one of them rose the clock, and the morning sun shone red on its tarnished gold. It was an ancient clock, but still capable of keeping good time—good enough, at least, for all the requirements of the house.

Malcolm and The Marquis of Lossie form the only true prequel-sequel doublet in the MacDonald corpus. The three other series (The Marshmallows and Wingfold trilogies, and the Gibbie/Donal doublet) are comprised of self-contained separate stories, building upon but not dependent on the others. The Marquis of Lossie, however, is intrinsically dependent on the events of Malcolm. They represent Part 1 and Part 2 of a continuous story.

Thus, Malcolm ends with the words, The story of Malcolm’s plans and what came of them, requires another book. If ever there was an invitation immediately to pick up a sequel, MacDonald has just given it! And as The Marquis of Lossie opens, in the second chapter, he briefly reviews the events of the first book, as authors of sequels must, to bring readers who may not have read the first book up to speed before moving ahead with the story.

The ending of Malcolm and opening of The Marquis of Lossie, indeed, flow so seamlessly together that it seems MacDonald must have completed the former and started the latter without pausing for a breath, simply turning the page and continuing on.

Such was not the case however. Astonishingly, four books came between them. Though we cannot know for certain when the sequel was written, judging from serialization and publication dates, it is possible that two-and-a-half years passed between the last page of Malcolm and the first page of The Marquis of Lossie.

I call this fact astonishing because I know how difficult it is to pick up the threads from one book and continue on as if no time had passed. The complex emotion and thought that goes into writing a novel, keeping the many moving parts and clues and themes in your head as you weave the story-tapestry to a conclusion, is all-consuming. By the final stages of a novel, you are eating, breathing, and sleeping with your characters and plot intricacies, trying to get all the pieces to fit. You are living in your story 24-7. The emotional release and mental relief of completion is enormous.

Sustaining that, or getting it all back later, to move into a sequel is one of the most difficult jobs a writer of series fiction faces. That’s why I make a practice of always continuing into the sequel immediately, even if for only a chapter or two, to set the momentum in place with the new story, so that picking up the threads will be easier when the time comes again to give it my full attention.

The longer the gap between the books, however, the more difficult it is to recreate the all-absorbing emotional energy and mental focus that writing a novel requires. I can scarcely fathom how George MacDonald was able to wait two-and-a-half years, write four books in the meantime, then continue on with Malcolm’s story as if he hadn’t set down his pen. Perhaps he used my technique of writing the first two or three chapters before taking the two-and-a-half-year break.

Nor did his hiatus stop the flow of inspiration. The magic of Malcolm’s story continues. I have a friend, in fact, for whom The Marquis of Lossie is even better than its prequel—the best, in his opinion, of all MacDonald’s novels.

Neither do I know how MacDonald got away with the gap between the books with his reading public. My readers squawk if they have to wait six months between books of a series. (Good-naturedly squawk of course.) Almost from the moment a book is released, the mail (and now email and Facebook messages) flood in: When will the next book be out—you have to write faster! One can only imagine MacDonald and his publishers fending off frantic requests for the story of Malcolm’s plans and what came of them, the moment readers had closed the covers of Malcolm.

Escaping a common pitfall of sequels not measuring up to the level of excellence of their predecessor, MacDonald crafts an equally engaging, and in some ways an even heightened dramatic crescendo to Malcolm’s story. With the setting so altered, this is a spectacular creative achievement. One might point to numerous examples of sheer storytelling craft. I would merely mention his continued development of the character of Florimel as, in my opinion, one of the most skillfully drawn portraits in his fictional corpus. The subtlety of her wavering relational affections toward Malcolm, Liftore, Lenorme, and Clementina, moments of insight followed by the petty responses of a selfish little girl, calling Malcolm MacPhail when he is out of favor, and Malcolm when the old tenderness surfaces, bragging about him to Clementina one minute, dismissing him angrily the next—it’s all exquisitely, humorously, poignantly done. I find both tears and laughter nearer the surface as I read this book more than is the case with any other MacDonald title.

And as noted in the discussion of Malcolm, the correspondence of place is palpable. When Judy and I are in Cullen, after reading some detail in one of the books we had not noticed before, often one of us jumps up and runs to one of several maps on our wall. ("There’s a town called Portlokie in Alec Forbes—it has to be Portsoy!) Or perhaps it’s out the door with book in hand. (There’s the street Malcolm was riding along when he turned toward the gate—that has to be Mrs. Catanach’s house!") Even as he describes the weather, the changeable directions of the wind, the fog (haar) out over the sea, the dune, the beach, the sunrise and sunset, the Cullen House grounds, the hazy sight of Morven across the firth, the harbor filling with sand, it is obvious he knows, if not every inch of Cullen, close to it. He goes so far as to describe the shine on a certain door in the Seaton at the very moment the sun sets over the rocks of Scarnose on June 23, two days after the longest day of the year.

The Marquis of Lossie was the second of MacDonald’s titles to be simultaneously serialized in England and the United States. It was serialized in Lippincott’s Magazine from November 1876 through September 1877, and in Scotland in the Glasgow Weekly Mail. (An entry in daughter Mary’s diary indicates that the last of the book was sent to the printers on April 16, 1877. ¹) Following serialization it was published in book form, like Malcolm, in three volumes in England, by faithful Hurst and Blackett (with Henry King, publisher of Malcolm, curiously nowhere to be seen) and by Lippincott in Philadelphia, again in their oversize two-column format. The Lippincott edition was called an Author’s Edition on the title page, evidence of MacDonald’s widening publishing relationships. Clearly he remained on good terms with the Lippincotts, whose editions were surely published by arrangement with MacDonald, not pirated.

It is about this time that Alexander Strahan’s brother-in-law A.P. Watt—informally at first—began to represent MacDonald’s work in a more direct agenting role. His work possibly grew from watching such unofficial activities by Strahan, for whom it was a natural part of his finger-in-every-pie approach to publishing. After joining Strahan’s firm, Watt became one of his brother-in-law’s partners, met and became friends with MacDonald, and gradually began helping MacDonald during the very years of the mid-1870s when Strahan’s fortunes were on the decline. Though his activities on MacDonald’s behalf began slowly, Watt formally started an Advertising Agency in 1878. The Marquis of Lossie is sometimes referenced as Watt’s first title represented for MacDonald. Watt may have been involved in some way by this time, but probably still informally. Even a year or two later, in the curious case of Paul Faber Surgeon, Watt does not appear to be actually handling negotiations for MacDonald. Nevertheless, this new development in MacDonald’s dealings with publishers was on the horizon and would grow. Watt’s role is traced in detail in the footnote to the introduction to Paul Faber, A.P. Watt—Accidental But Successful Agent.

Because many readers in the 1980s began their association with George MacDonald through the edited editions of the Malcolm doublet, and presumably some will do the same with the new editions of The Cullen Collection, it seems appropriate to amplify the retrospective begun in the introduction to Malcolm. The reissuing and publishing of new editions begun in the 1960s and continuing through the 1970s and 1980s, is now an intrinsic part of George MacDonald’s historical legacy, which hopefully the following overview will illuminate for new readers.

My own personal history with George MacDonald began in 1971.

(And one of the delightful connections between MacDonald readers is that we all have very personal histories with the Scotsman! Whenever MacDonald enthusiasts gather, the sharing of these histories—"How did you discover MacDonald?"—seems to dominate the conversations.)

Unbelievably it was almost fifty years ago now, when a friend told me about a quote from a book he had heard about from another mutual friend that essentially said: Whoever has enjoyed the writings of C.S. Lewis will naturally want to move on eventually to George MacDonald.

My first reaction was shock.

It was beyond belief that anyone could make such a comparison. The idea, even the implication, that this MacDonald, whoever he was, could produce writings beyond C.S. Lewis’s…the thing sounded nothing short of preposterous!

I was jealous of any insinuation threatening Lewis’s position in my mind as the greatest Christian writer of all time. At the time, even Lewis was still in the process of being discovered. The Lewis phenomenon had not yet hit. It will be hard for readers now to appreciate the fact that almost no one in the U.S. had heard of Narnia in the late 1960s. The explosion of interest in C.S. Lewis had not yet begun. So after our discovery of Narnia, when we began to share our set, we were letting people in on a fantastic secret.

And to suggest that one could move on from Lewis—implying Lewis the lightweight and MacDonald the heavyweight—it was a premise that made my head spin.

Yet somehow I could not dislodge the words from my mind. Eventually I had to find out who George MacDonald was, what he had written, and what he might have to say.

When Judy and I found MacDonald’s Princess and Curdie fairy tales in our local library, our Narnian appetite for imaginative fairy stories coupled with Christian allegory was naturally aroused. And upon completion I had to admit, Hmm, these are pretty good—a definite addition to the Narnia tradition.

By then I could see that this MacDonald, whoever he was, held definite promise.

Therefore, Judy and I continued to seek out more of his works. North Wind followed. We also found a copy of Elizabeth Yates’ masterfully condensed Sir Gibbie in our library, and enjoyed it enormously. It was a realistic novel not a fairy tale, which in its edited form was one of the best books I had ever read. It was nothing short of fantastic.

I was discovering in MacDonald the very thing that made Lewis so special—the ability to include insightful principles and profound spiritual wisdom in a well-written, compelling story. MacDonald also seemed to share Lewis’s wide-ranging gifts and diverse abilities as a writer. He was not limited to one or two styles or genres. In all his writings, I sensed the same wisdom coming forth, the same penetrating spiritual perceptions, the same intensely practical Christianity, and the same expansive portrayal of God’s nature and character.

After reading the few MacDonald titles we could find, my curiosity was kindled to learn what I could about the man. And what should I discover but that he had been Lewis’s favorite author!

MacDonald was to C.S. Lewis what Lewis had become to me. So highly did Lewis feel indebted to him, in fact, that he compiled an anthology of selections from MacDonald’s works, in the Preface of which he made the startling statement: I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master. ² And, indeed, wherever I went in the writings of Lewis from that moment on, I discovered hints of this very thing. His letters often mention various MacDonald books he was reading. In both the Anthology and his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis credits MacDonald’s Phantastes with starting him on the road toward conversion to Christianity. And in The Great Divorce Lewis sets a pseudo-fictional (but not entirely fictional!) MacDonald into his story as his guide through heaven.

How could I have missed all these connections between Lewis and MacDonald?

Clearly, though MacDonald had been dead for sixty-six years, he was a literary force to be reckoned with. His books had a profound influence wherever they were read. Yet as I began to delve more deeply into the life of this nineteenth-century Scotsman, I quickly discovered that though he had written over fifty volumes, only a handful were currently in print—and those were only short stories and fairy tales. Not a single full length realistic novel, not a single volume of sermons or poetry, was to be had. Within another year or two even the edition of Sir Gibbie we had checked out from our library was taken out of print. We had been lucky to find a copy when we did.

Judy and I therefore began a long search—through old bookstores, employing out-of-print antiquarian search services, borrowing and photocopying volumes from libraries or other individuals we met who also knew about MacDonald—to find what we could. Gradually we unearthed more of MacDonald’s books. What we discovered was that his most common form of writing was not fantasy or fairy tale at all, but lengthy Victorian novels just like Sir Gibbie in its original, much like the novels of his contemporary Charles Dickens. Though none of that full-length fiction was in print, it was by far MacDonald’s most frequently used format.

The first old full-length original MacDonald novel we managed to locate was Robert Falconer. I admit that the Scots dialect prevented me from thoroughly appreciating Falconer’s story at first read. My reaction was actually a little ho-hum. The long ponderous style and dialect and digressions were a far cry from the bright, lively, readable edited Sir Gibbie we had enjoyed. Robert Falconer seemed tedious by comparison. It was also full of boring poetry—way too much poetry for a novel, if you asked me—which I simply skipped.

But I wasn’t about to give up. At the same time we had located an old copy of The Marquis of Lossie, and eventually also found a copy of Malcolm. In this case I found the dialect even more intimidating. In Robert Falconer at least it wasn’t until page five that the Doric dialogue slammed me in the face. In Malcolm, it started with the first line and filled the entire first two chapters. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. I went back and tried to read those chapters again, and a third time, then finally continued on. After giving up more than once, I eventually plodded my way through the story at a snail’s pace. When I first encountered Malcolm’s grandfather Duncan, the dialect took on a peculiar enunciation and weird pronoun use that made it all the worse to understand (which I later learned was a western and peculiarly highland dialect, reflecting Duncan’s upbringing in the west of Scotland):

"I could fery well wish…tat you would be learnin’ to speak your own lancuach. It is all fery well for ta Sassenach…podies to read ta Piple in English, for it will be pleasing ta Maker not to make tem cawpable of ta Gaelic, no more tan monkeys; but for all tat it’s not ta vord of God. Ta Gaelic is ta lancuach of ta carden of Aiden, and no doubt but it pe ta lancuach in which ta Shepherd calls his sheep on ta everlastin’ hills…it was ta new Minister—he speak an’ say to her: ‘Mr. MacPhail, you ought to make your prayers in Enclish,’ I was fery wrathful, and I answered and said: ‘Mr. Downey, do you tare to suppose tat God doesn’t prefer ta Gaelic to ta Sassenach tongue!?’—’Mr. MacPhail,’ says he, ‘it’ll pe for your poy I mean it. How’s ta lad to learn ta way of salvation if you speak to your God in his presence in a strange tongue? So I was opedient to his vord, and ta next efening I tid kneel town in Sassenach and I tid make begin. But, ochone! she wouldn’t go; her tongue would be cleafing to ta roof of her mouth; ta claymore would be sticking rusty in ta scappard; for her heart she was ashamed to speak to ta Hielan’man’s Maker in ta Sassenach tongue. You must pe learning ta Gaelic, or you’ll not pe peing worthy to pe her nain son, Malcolm…Ta Gaelic is ta lancuach of Nature, and wants no learning. I nefer did pe learning it, yat I nefer haf to say to myself ‘What is it she would be saying?’ when I speak ta Gaelic; put she always has to set ta tead men—that is ta vords—on their feet, and put tem in pattle-array, when she would pe speaking ta dull mechanic English. When she opens her mouth to it, ta Gaelic comes like a spring of pure water, Malcolm. Ta plenty of it must run out. Try it now, Malcolm. Shust oppen your mouth in ta Gaelic shape, and see if ta Gaelic will not pe falling from it…

Aigh! Aigh!…aigh! aigh! she’ll die happy! she’ll die happy! Hear till her poy, how he makes ta pipes speak ta true Gaelic! Ta pest o’ Gaelic, tat! Old Tuncan’s pipes ’ll not know how to be talking Sassenach. See to it! see to it! He had put to blow in at ta one end, and out came ta reel at the other. Hoogh! hoogh! Play us ta Righil Thulachan, Malcolm, my chief!

I struggled through it to get the gist of the story. You could make it out by staring at the words and sort of imagining them spoken aloud. It wasn’t as if it was Greek. But who wants to read a novel that way? I felt like I was reading through literary molasses.

However, gradually a strange thing began to happen.

I began to get caught up in two aspects of the story—the positively fascinating relationship between Malcolm and Florimel, and the magic of the locale. As I continued, slowly and inexorably I was drawn through a wardrobe into my very own literary Narnia.

By the time I met the marquis, with Duncan playing his bagpipes at Lossie House, I was thoroughly hooked. I was not exactly flying through the book—I’m not sure anyone flies through a MacDonald novel!—but I was moving at a high rate of speed.

Whenever I came upon a long stretch of dialogue in Duncan’s peculiar western tongue, or a ten-page legend in Doric of an old ruined castle, I skipped ahead until I could see that the story had resumed. Again I skipped the poetry, skimming through the dialect as I could while keeping hold of the plot, and yes—by the time I was three-quarters through the book, I was flying!

It was a page turner!

This was simply the best constructed, most brilliantly conceived, thoroughly engrossing, skillfully written novel I had ever read! Every strand of the intricate plot was woven together into an exquisite tapestry that literally left me breathless with its scope. The final scene between Mr. Graham and the marquis was the most powerful exchange between two people I had ever read. The whole was simply a masterpiece of fiction.

And the reality of place was so tangible and real that one could not help falling in love with the setting no less than the characters and story. Portlossie became my personal Narnia. I wanted to be transported there, to walk its streets, its wide expanse of beach, its rocky bluffs. From that moment I knew I had to visit Scotland—though it would be more than a decade before that dream materialized. The entire experience of the book consumed me.

I finished Malcolm and went immediately on to the sequel, The Marquis of Lossie, which—with far less dialect, and again skipping the poetry—I flew through in another three or four days.

Then I did what I do not think I had ever done before, nor have again since—I closed The Marquis and went right back and started Malcolm again. Cullen and the entire fabric of the story had indeed become my Narnia—a world I had been completely drawn into, a world that had changed me—that, like Lucy and the others, I did not want to leave.

I had been time-warped into George MacDonald’s world.

But unlike Narnia, it was not a fairy-tale world which, in your saner moments you know doesn’t really exist. It was no fantasy world of witches and dwarves and fawns and fairy-tale castles. My Narnia was a real world—a true-to-life place that you could find on a map, with real people, a real beach, real ocean waves. There really was a Lossie House (though it was called Cullen House) in a real Scottish village where I met real people—Malcolm, Miss Horn, Mistress Catanach, Sandy Graham, Florimel, the marquis, the mad laird, Blue Peter. Well…sort of real people!

In its own way, it was better than Narnia!

That’s when our search for as many of MacDonald’s old novels as we could find became a passion. It took years—writing letters to bookstores all across the country and in Britain, waiting months for answers, writing more letters, ordering one copy here, another there…as gradually our library of dusty old books expanded…Thomas Wingfold,