While George MacDonald’s reputation as a fiction writer rests upon fantasy and Christianity more than realism, his realist novels reflect a remarkable generic range. MacDonald wrote twenty-nine realist novels between 1863 and 1897, most of them set in Scotland and England. Together, these novels share many overlapping themes and plot trajectories, and critics have objected to their formulaic characters (noble workmen, saintly women, dying children) and predictably happy endings. These shared features aside, the novels set in England also provide a micro-history of ‘the novel’ in the later Victorian age, incorporating elements of the social-problem novel and a concern for the urban poor; the sensation novel’s detective plot; and the gothic novel’s seeming supernaturalism, ultimately explained by nature. This chapter examines these subgenres as well as MacDonald’s sophisticated use of metafiction. While metafiction has been dominantly explored in modernism, MacDonald is one of many Victorian novelists whose self-conscious formal techniques draw attention to his experimental realism.