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George McDonald and His Wife

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Written in 1924 by George MacDonald's eldest son Greville in honour of his father's centennial birthday, _George MacDonald and His Wife_ is an indispensable read for the truly devoted MacDonald fan. While Greville lacks the critical edge of George MacDonald's most recent biographer William Raeper (who published _George MacDonald_ in 1989), Greville's wholehearted, if uncritical, tribute to his beloved father is important in that it anticipates C.S. Lewis's upholding of George MacDonald as ideal father figure and spiritual mentor. As well, Greville's account is noteworthy for its heavily pro-Scottish leanings, an aspect of MacDonald's writing that is is frequently overlooked by today's readers, more interested in MacDonald's mysticism than in his nationalism.

If anything makes this biography worth its price, it is G.K. Chesterton's Introduction. Chesterton's discussion of the castle in MacDonald's _The Princess and the Goblin_ reaches back to the middle ages to consider the allegorical ancestry of MacDonald's fantasy stories, while simultaneously situating itself firmly in the modern era, evoking, in his description of Princess Irene's castle, echoes of Freud's concept of the uncanny, a psychological concept also based on an architectural model, and first published in 1919:

"There is something not only imaginative but intimately true about the idea of the goblins being below the house and capable of besieging it from the cellars. When the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside. Anyhow, that simpleimage of a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always wait for the one and watch against the other, has always remained in my mind and something singularly solid and unanswerable; and was more corroborated than corrected when I came to give a more definite name to the lady watching over us from the turret, and perhaps to take a more practical view of the goblins under the floor" (Chesterton, Introdcution 10-11).

This book may not appeal to everyone. It is long, ponderous at times. Greville's writing has not the dream-like mystical qualities of his father's writing , let alone G.K .Chesterton's liveliness and verve. But what he lacks in talent he makes up for in enthusiasm for his father's life-long project of fulfilling Novalis's dictum: that life is not a fairy tale, but should and perhaps will become one.