Scholars have sometimes questioned whether the gothic is a genre that has any purchase on MacDonald’s writings, since his theology is so optimistic. Yet MacDonald’s fiction is replete with tropes associated with the gothic literary mode: secret chambers and labyrinthine passages, magic mirrors, battling skeletons, ghosts and supernatural voices. These figures and effects recur throughout his work, not only in the romances but also in his realist ‘kailyard’ Scottish novels. MacDonald’s work participates in a wider late Victorian turn toward a ‘realist’ gothic in which the supernatural basis of reality was a given, whether in Oliphan’s man at the library window, whose real presence is attested by several characters, or Stoker’s Dracula, who can be controlled by Catholic sacramentals. MacDonald goes further, crafting a fully gothic mystical theology, a journey into the life of God himself. His Gothic engenders an initiation into an occluded but real supernatural realm, in which, paradoxically, the fear of distance enables a closer mystical union with the divine.

The library offers an apt metaphor for approaching MacDonald’s literary influences. As the narrator of The Portent (1864) remarks of the ‘neglected library’ he is asked to organise, even the outside of a book can serve as ‘a kind of sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. To read MacDonald is thus to enter the library of books he himself inhabited, for few writers so openly acknowledged their debts to earlier masters and their forms. This chapter traces the works that most shaped MacDonald’s development as a writer of fantasy, particularly the German Romantics and his contemporaries John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. For MacDonald, the library of past and present writers was not a site of anxiety but a communal space of imaginative fellowship; by tending to it, he helped build a new wing for modern fantasy while extending the spiritual possibilities of the realist novel.

George MacDonald’s best-known and most influential works are his two fantasy novels for adults: Phantastes and Lilith. They are also, arguably, his least typical works. It can be difficult for modern-day readers to comprehend these idiosyncratic texts through the distorting glass of the twentieth century, particularly the development of psychoanalysis and genre fantasy. This chapter, then, offers a door into these complex, fascinating texts by reading MacDonald’s fantasy novels on their own terms. It positions each novel within its biographical context, indicating how it relates to other works MacDonald was writing at the time, and re-examines the question of why he turned to this genre at the beginning and ending of his career. It then offers a comparative analysis of the two novels. What emerges is a glimpse into MacDonald’s profound effort to maintain hope and faith in face of his own mortality and devastating personal tragedy.

When George MacDonald discusses how the imagination works by first moving our feelings, which then promote thought, he acknowledges that a genuine work of art will strike one person differently from the way it strikes another person. We call this interpretation, and the interpretation of art is expansive, open, full of possibilities. As MacDonald says, a work of art may mean many things. What matters is the creative relationship between the reader and the book.

This chapter documents the almost entirely unexplored scientific biography of MacDonald, who found himself, in his Scottish education, at the forefront of Victorian innovation in science and science education. It resituates MacDonald’s writing within the contested debates and paradigm shifts in Victorian science, which attempted to redefine what science was and who got to participate in it – notions that changed drastically throughout MacDonald’s long life. It shows with which voices and views MacDonald aligned himself and into which discussions he actively sought to intervene, including on how Victorians envisioned its application especially in the ‘improvement’ of society. MacDonald’s fiction, and indeed fantastic literature in general, can be read as a foremost medium of engagement with and communication of scientific ideas. The final section of the chapter reads Lilith in this light – as MacDonald’s reflections on the place of science within society and the importance of it being unified with the imagination.