As this short list indicates, MacDonald's presence is felt on both sides of the Atlantic. His books continue to appear in various forms and edited for modern readers, and at least two of his stories,
The Princess and the Goblin and "The Light Princess," (1864) have appeared as films.
George MacDonald was born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, on 10 December 1824. He was the second son of George and Helen MacDonald, and he was raised on a farm not far from the village. In A Dish of Orts (1895) MacDonald wrote that his "earliest definable memory" was the funeral of the duke of Gordon, and death was a constant presence in the author's life, as it was in the lives of most Victorians. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was eight years old, and only three years earlier a brother had been stillborn. MacDonald himself was diagnosed as tubercular in 1850, and several of his children died from the disease.
As a child, MacDonald wandered the hills about Huntly and investigated the great castle, with its black dungeon and marvelous spiral staircase rising from the ruins of a great tower. The countryside of MacDonald's youth provided material for much of his later work, and Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865) contains an explicit description of Huntly Castle's dungeon and stairs.
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