A little princess is protected by her friend Curdie from the goblin miners who live beneath the castle. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

George MacDonald is famous for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels. He was a great inspiration to many writers of his time including C. S. Lewis, who wrote "Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later, I knew that I had crossed a great frontier." G. K. Chesterton said that The Princess and the Goblin was a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence." His three fantasy novels for children are available here in one volume. They are so strange and dreamlike that adults often enjoy them as much as the children. MacDonald says "For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five." So whether you are young or just young at heart this is a book that will enthral you with its displays of courage and loyalty, and with the allegories between the fantastic world painted and the spiritual world MacDonald perceives.

The great Victorian Christian author George MacDonald is the well-spring of the modern fantasy genre. In this book Colin Manlove offers explorations of MacDonald's eight shorter fairy tales and his longer stories At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, and The Princess and Curdie. MacDonald saw the imagination as the source of fairy tales and of divine truth together. For he believed that God lives in the depths of the human mind and “sends up from thence wonderful gifts into the light of the understanding.” This makes MacDonald that very rare thing: a writer of mystical fiction whose work can give us experience of the divine. Throughout his children’s fantasy stories MacDonald is describing the human and divine imagination. In the shorter tales he shows how the imagination has different regions and depths, each able to shift into the other. With the longer stories we see the imagination in relation to other aspects of the self and to its position in the world. Here the imagination is portrayed as often embattled in relation to empiricism, egotism, and greed.

The Princess and Curdie is a children's classic fantasy novel by George MacDonald from late 1883. The book is the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin. The adventure continues with Princess Irene and Curdie a year or two older. They must overthrow a set of corrupt ministers who are poisoning Irene's father, the king. Irene's grandmother also reappears and gives Curdie a strange gift. A monster called Lina aids his quest.Two years have passed since the last book, and Princess Irene and her father go to Gwyntystorm, while Curdie (a miner boy who is the friend of the Princess) stays at home with his mother and father. As the years go by, Curdie begins to hunt for pleasure. He also slowly begins to doubt Irene's story of her great-great grandmother. One day, he shoots down a white pigeon.

George MacDonald occupied a major position in the intellectual life of his Victorian contemporaries. This volume brings together all eleven of his shorter fairy stories as well as his essay "The Fantastic Imagination". The subjects are those of traditional fantasy: good and wicked fairies, children embarking on elaborate quests, and journeys into unsettling dreamworlds. Within this familiar imaginative landscape, his children's stories were profoundly experimental, questioning the association of childhood with purity and innocence, and the need to separate fairy tale wonder from adult scepticism and disbelief.