SOURCE: “Lilith,” in The Golden Key: A Study of the Fiction of George MacDonald, Yale University Press, 1961, pp. 326-71.

In the following essay, Wolff discusses the events in MacDonald's life that led up to his writing of Lilith.

“This River has been a Terror to many, yea the thoughts of it also have often frighted me.”

—The Pilgrim's Progress

I

For the MacDonalds, the eighties and nineties were decades of trial. They named their house in Bordighera “Casa Coraggio”: MacDonald had long before discovered that “Corage, God Mend Al,” was an anagram of “George MacDonald,” and inscribed it on his book-plate, with Blake's picture of the aged “man through death's door going,” who enters the tomb in weariness, and emerges at the top young and vigorous, like Mossy after the bath of the Old Man of the Sea, leaving “old Death behind.”¹ The huge household at Bordighera grew...