THE LIGHT PRINCESS

“The fairy story may be made a vehicle of Mystery. That at least is what George MacDonald attempted, achieving stories of power and beauty when he succeeded."

J. R. Tolkien

George MacDonald was born in1824.Writer’s homeland, Scotland, is the country of fighting highland clans and greatest bagpipe players. His great-grandfather was a brilliant bagpiper, his father was a farmer occupied with bleaching works, his mother died when he was eight. After school George took the degree at the University of Aberdeen, and then he went to London in 1845. There he entered the Highbury College for the Congregational ministry. In London he met Louisa Powell, who later became his wife and the mother of their eleven children.

MacDonald`s freethinking and bold world view always attracted wrath and anger of church fathers. As George was unable to oppose the ministry with their orthodox way of thought, he decided to resign and move to Manchester.

There he worked as a literature and math lecturer. Exactly that time he seriously got into writing. In 1858 his novel Phantastes brought him huge success. This book is considered the first fantasy novel in the English literature and is still popular.

Back to London, MacDonald became a professor of English Literature in Bedford College. His gothic novel David Elginbrod raised his popularity as a writer and the book was sold like hot cakes. However his own children didn’t want that long complicated and educative novels, but those magic fairy-tales which he could easily invent and so artistically narrate.

MacDonald created his fairy-tales one after another and later they were included in British Literature Golden Collection. Such short masterpieces as The Light Princess, The Giant`s Heart and The Golden Key came into one book called Dealings with the Fairies (1867).Right that time George MacDonald met and became friends with John Ruskin a brilliant cognoscente and Lewis Carroll. In 1863 Carroll – yet unknown, math professor – showed his draft of Alice to Macdonald hoping that he would find it interesting for publication.

MacDonald continued to work hard. The stories appeared one after another: At the Back of the North Wind, then The Princess and the Goblin. The secret of longevity of his magic stories is simple: “I write not for children, but for those who are innocent and sincere like children, no matter if he is five or fifty, or seventy,” MacDonald once said.

In the beginning of 1870s MacDonald went to read lectures in America and there he turned out to be perhaps more famous than Dickens. During that tour he got acquainted with Mark Twain and they started thinking of writing a novel together. MacDonald always had a lot of plans and ideas for the future and he worked very hard creating and publishing one novel after another. In addition he was flattened with grief as his three kids died from tuberculosis and he also turned ill. The writer was disappointed in people and early became old. Hence his books were sadder. George MacDonald died in 1905.