Lilith

This new edition features the complete and unabridged text, an extensive Introduction by Greville MacDonald, and his “Paraphrase of the Earlier Manuscript-Version With Quotations and Comments”.

George MacDonald’s epic fantasy Lilith is a strange and spellbinding tale in which travel between different realms (his son Greville describes it as a “romance of the Dimensions”) is combined with a psychologically rich, spiritually powerful story which has fascinated generations of readers. In the opening chapters the hero, Mr Vane, follows his family’s ancient retainer through a mirror in the attic of his house into an utterly unknown world. There he finds enigma upon enigma awaiting him, from the shape-shifting librarian who is his only guide, to the riddles his new companion puts to him, to the myriad creatures both good and evil with whom his destiny brings him into frequent contact.

Like MacDonald’s original fantasy masterpiece Phantastes, which is known to have “baptised” the imagination of a famous heir, Lilith, his final contribution to the genre, has (to quote one of its later chapters) called many of us “farther in, higher up” to the home we have yet to discover. Indeed, it is at its core, and for all its strangeness, a tale of spiritual growth and redemption, showing (as MacDonald wrote in another of his later works) that “the Life in us is stronger than the Death, in as much as the creating Good is stronger than the created Evil.”