George MacDonald was considered to be one of the great Victorian writers and thinkers of his time, and his contemporaries ranked him with Dickens, Trollope and Carlyle. MacDonald’s output was prodigious, and his books now grow more popular every day. Those with a taste for fairy tales may enjoy Phantastes and his children’s books At the Back of the North Wind , The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie . His popularity is in some measure thanks to the homage C.S. Lewis paid to him as the inspiration for much of his own development.MacDonald was essentially a Christian thinker, but like many Victorians something of a rebel in his dislike of formalised, dogmatic religion. He was also a symbolist. He expressed universal truths in images common to mankind: light and darkness, childhood and old age, fire, water and wind. The whole of nature was for him an expression of the spiritual realm that lies beyond it. This biography, the first published for decades, draws out the various strands in MacDonald’s life: his religious journey, his development as a writer, his many friends (who included Ruskin and F.D. Maurice), and the joys and sorrows of bringing up a large family. This book will do much to re-established his considerable reputation.