George MacDonald is remembered as one of the founding fathers of modern fantasy. Although he wrote many different kinds of books, including realistic novels, poetry, sermons, and literary criticism, his imaginative fairy tales of growth and redemption were his most influential. According to Roderick McGillis, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "MacDonald's fantasies for children, especially At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872), have influenced such major writers of children's books as E. Nesbit, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Maurice Sendak, and Madeleine L'Engle." Writing moral stories that mingled the real and the fantastic, he created a literature that "hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic," as Lewis wrote in his preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology. "More than any writer of his time," wrote Glenn Edward Sadler in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, MacDonald "understood the symbolic richness of the...