This month I’m recommending a neglected Fantasy Classic – George MacDonald’s extraordinary novel Lilith. This Scottish author is still fondly remembered for his Fantasy fiction for children such as The Princess and the Goblins and The Light Princess (see Fantasy Reads January 2013) but his two adult Fantasy novels Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) are less well known. There are various ebook or paperback editions of Lilith available or you could indulge in the beautiful hardback version published by the George MacDonald Society in 2022 which has striking illustrations by Gabrielle Ragusi.

Both Phantastes and Lilith are first-person accounts of dream-journeys. The narrator of Lilith cannot remember his own identity for much of the story but he is addressed by others as Mr Vane, so we’ll call him that. Vane is a scholarly young man who has no friends or close family. At the start of the book, Vane has recently moved into an ancestral mansion of which he knows very little. He spends most of his time in the house’s fine library and is puzzled when he glimpses a shadowy figure there and finds books moved around. Vane’s butler tells him that the library is said to be haunted by a former Librarian named Mr Raven and reminds Vane that one of his ancestors mysteriously disappeared from the house.

One day Vane glimpses the ghostly librarian and follows him through the house to a garret which contains nothing but a tall mirror. Vane stumbles through the mirror into a wild landscape where he meets Mr Raven, who looks like a raven from the front and a man from behind. During a riddling conversation Mr Raven tells Vane that he has found a door out and must learn how to make himself at home in this new region of seven dimensions. Vane flees back into the house but has he really escaped? The very next day Vane finds himself following Mr Raven into an unfamiliar world.

Mr Raven takes Vane to his Sexton’s Cottage to meet his wife. Vane is overwhelmed by her numinous beauty but is horrified when she invites him to join the peaceful dead who sleep in her house until it is time for their awakening. After discovering a manuscript which describes some of his late father’s experiences with Mr Raven, Vane returns to the cottage but is refused entry and told that he must find his own way. He wanders through a moonlit landscape full of monsters and enters the Evil Wood where the restless dead fight each other. When he arrives in a waterless land which is still full of apple trees, Vane is captured by a race of brutal and stupid giants but befriended by the affectionate Little Ones, a group of children who also live there unseen by the giants.

The leader of the Little Ones, a wise girl called Lona, explains that from time to time, babies are found in a nearby wood. A few of them grow up to be giants but most remain loving and innocent children. Vane becomes very fond of Lona and the Little Ones and longs to help and protect them but he has to leave when the giants threaten to kill him. Vane is warned to beware of the Cat-woman who lives in the nearby desert but finds the veiled woman a stern but kind hostess. She tells him about the nearby city of Bulika and its greedy and selfish inhabitants. Bulika is ruled by an ancient and powerful princess who keeps the land dry and forbids her subjects to have children. Her will is enforced by a terrible leopardess who stalks the streets by night.

After encountering more troubled souls reduced to living skeletons, Vane finds the body of an emaciated woman. Realizing that she is not quite dead, Vane nurses her back to health, even though he himself is weakened by something that bites him while he is asleep. After some weeks, the woman recovers but shows nothing but anger and contempt towards her rescuer. When he learns who she is, Vane wonders if he has made a terrible mistake, but against advice from Mr Raven, he presses on with a plan to help the Little Ones by trying to take over the city of Bulika. His actions only lead him to The House of Bitterness and the House of Death but is there still hope for the Little Ones and for Vane’s personal journey?

George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a remarkable man. He was brought up in Scotland as a chrished member of a relatively poor but highly educated family. MacDonald studied scientific subjects at Aberdeen University but later trained as a Congregationalist Minister. In 1851 he married an intelligent young woman called Louisa, giving her a passionate poem he had written as a wedding present. They became a famously devoted couple who were serious-minded but not solemn. They wrote plays for their numerous children to perform and welcomed a wide range of visitors, including John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) into their home. MacDonald and his children were what we might now call the Beta Readers for Alice in Wonderland and their enthusiasm encouraged Dodgson to publish his unique novel.

MacDonald was not a success as a clergyman because of his unconventional beliefs. He continued to preach and to work out his own distinctive theology, but supported his growing family by teaching literature and by writing. MacDonald believed that men and women should be educated equally so among the places he taught was Bedford College, the first institution in England to offer women full university degrees. His writing included poetry, essays, works of literary criticism, numerous realistic novels which often had Scottish settings, and Fantasy short stories and novels. He is also the author of my favourite quote about fiction – Even if wholly fictitious, a good story is always true.

Lilith was one of MacDonald’s last books, written at a time when he was struggling with ill-health and depression. I am not going to pretend that this dark and intense novel is an easy read or one that will please everybody. There are things in the novel that I find problematic and even Louisa MacDonald apparently thought Lilith shocking. What makes it special is that you are getting one person’s unfiltered, uncensored vision of the way the universe works and that is something which is increasingly rare. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress are obvious influences but you don’t need to have read either of these works to appreciate the hellish landscapes of Lilith or Vane’s extremely unsteady spritual progress.

Lilith draws on Jewish and Christian traditions but, as you can probably tell from my synopsis, it is far from being a straightforward Christian allegory. Some of its characters are very different from the way in which they appear in the Bible. In the course of the story, Vane realizes that he has encountered his ultimate ancestors Adam and Eve, Mara, the Lady of Sorrow, and Adam’s legendary first wife, Lilith. MacDonald boldly makes Adam/Mr Raven into the type of animal guide through the Spirit Realms that is found in many different religions and cultures. In one of the most striking images in the book Mr Raven digs up worms with his beak and tosses them into the air where they become butterflies and soar aloft. This Adam and Eve are no longer the guilty and miserable couple turned out of Paradise. They are the wise guardians and helpers of humanity who embody MacDonald’s controversial belief in Universal Redemption – the idea that in the end all souls, whatever their sins, could turn to God and be redeemed.

Eve is a majestic figure in Lilith and that is typical of MacDonald. Unusually for his era, MacDonald’s Fantasy fiction was full of female aspects of the divine and female embodiments of wisdom. In Lilith there is the added fascination of complex feline symbolism for the female archetypes, most strikingly in the two leopardesses – one spotted and destructive and one unspotted and protective. This is a story about a leopard who can and must change their spots. Lilith is only mentioned in the Bible as a dweller in a waste places but in Jewish mythology after refusing to sleep with Adam and bear him children, she became a type of blood-sucking demon who seduced men and threatened the lives of pregnant women and babies. Lilith’s rejection of male authority has endeared her to modern feminist thinkers. MacDonald’s ferocious but tormented Lilith is magnificent in her defiance as she refuses to give up her sense of self in order to accept love and forgiveness. She cries out, `I will be myself and not another!’

MacDonald’s narrator, Vane, is a fallible everyman figure rather than a dauntless hero. Vane is too afraid to remake himself and `die into life’. Mr Raven reminds this reclusive scholar that people are more precious and glorious than books and Vane does learn to love others through his interaction with Lona and the Little Ones. Things go wrong when Vane tries to act the hero and leads the Little Ones on a kind of Children’s Crusade against Bulika, a corrupt city which has much in common with Victorian London. You can imagine how well that goes. It may seem morbid to us to write about the deaths of children but it comes from MacDonald’s lived experience. He had to make sense of a world in which he had suffered the early deaths of beloved siblings, children and grandchildren.

Lilith may be a dark book but it is not a depressing one. MacDonald always said that he wrote for childlike readers of any age and in this novel he tries to celebrate the quality of childlike innocence which allows souls free entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. MacDonald’s belief that there is hope even for the most wicked also shines through. As he dryly remarks, `God can even save the rich’. There are many myths, legends and works of Epic Fantasy which centre on a battle between Good and Evil. Though it contains a terrifying villainess, Lilith is different. This is a story about a battle to turn Evil into Good which will go on until the end of time. No soul is to be left behind. Until next month…

Geraldine