George MacDonald

George MacDonald’s importance in C. S. Lewis’s account lies both in his imaginative influence and in the religious quality Lewis discovered in his writing. Reading MacDonald’s Phantastes, Lewis experienced fantasy not merely as an escape or a source of the elusive Joy he had pursued, but as a medium through which holiness could illuminate the fictional world and ordinary life. Later, MacDonald’s Christianity became one instance of a contradiction Lewis could no longer ignore: authors he admired deeply were often religious, while writers aligned with his earlier outlook seemed comparatively thin.

The Writer Encountered Through Phantastes

On an October evening at Leatherhead station, Lewis picked up an Everyman edition of Phantastes from the bookstall. He had gone to Leatherhead in winter to look for books and have his hair cut; the purchase was made before a weekend of reading. The fantasy’s woodland journeys, ghostly adversaries, and good and evil ladies were familiar enough to draw him in without his initially perceiving a change in what the reading meant to him.

The story seemed to contain material already dear to Lewis from Malory, Spenser, William Morris, and W. B. Yeats. Yet something in it was new. Lewis later called this quality the bright shadow and identified it as holiness: a presence that did not stand apart from the fantasy as an abstract lesson, but rested upon its landscapes and characters. The book thus became a turning point in his experience of MacDonald, joining imaginative attraction to a religious dimension he had not expected.

The Bright Shadow and Ordinary Life

Lewis describes the change through the image of crossing into a new country. The transition was so gradual that he compared it to being carried across a frontier in sleep. The new quality also seemed impossibly near: not a distant object to pursue, but a presence so close that he could not grasp it by continuing to seek it in the same way. In this reading experience, the confusions that had complicated his pursuit of Joy fell away. He did not mistake the tale’s scenes for literal realities or suppose that entering Anodos’s woods would bring him physically nearer to his desire.

At the same time, the light could not be separated from the story carrying it. As Lewis read, it seemed to spread from the woods and cottages into his own past, the room where he sat, and the everyday objects around him, including bread on the table and coals in the grate. Earlier experiences of Joy had made the common world seem like a desert once the vision passed; Phantastes instead disclosed ordinary things within the bright shadow, transformed but not erased. Lewis describes this imaginative change as a kind of baptism, while emphasizing that the rest of him changed more slowly. He did not yet understand the full consequence of having bought the book.

Christianity and Lewis’s Changing Judgment

MacDonald’s religious convictions initially sat awkwardly with Lewis’s admiration. Looking back on his earlier reading, Lewis recalls having regarded MacDonald as a great writer who was good despite his Christianity, as though Christianity were an unfortunate eccentricity. That judgment was part of a wider habit of discounting religious belief even when the works themselves moved him.

As Lewis’s reading broadened, the pattern became harder to dismiss. He found depth in writers such as MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Samuel Johnson, Spenser, and Milton, all of whom were religious, while authors associated with modern enlightenment seemed to him entertaining but comparatively thin. His response to English writers sharpened the paradox: the religious George Herbert seemed to convey the texture of lived experience with exceptional force, though Lewis still thought of the Christian framework through which Herbert wrote as mythology. MacDonald’s place in this reassessment is therefore more than that of a formative fantasy writer: his work helped expose the gap between Lewis’s assumptions about Christianity and the books that had most deeply nourished him.

Narrative Significance

MacDonald enters Lewis’s story principally through the effect of a book. The account gives the reading itself unusual weight: a modest purchase at a railway bookstall becomes the occasion for a lasting change in how Lewis understood imagination, desire, and the world beyond the page. The decisive movement is not from fiction to a separate spiritual abstraction, but from the light within the fiction to the common things surrounding the reader.

The later recollection of MacDonald’s Christianity extends that change into Lewis’s intellectual life. What he had once treated as a defect in a favored author becomes evidence against his own earlier assumptions. MacDonald’s significance consequently joins two strands of Lewis’s development: the imaginative experience of holiness in Phantastes and the accumulating recognition that religious writers could disclose a fuller, denser reality than the outlook Lewis had once trusted.