SOURCE: “Searching for Great-Great-Grandmother: Powerful Women in George MacDonald's Fantasies,” in Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 15, No. 2, December, 1991, pp. 27-34.

In the following essay, John suggests that MacDonald's fantasies are valuable for feminist study because of the positive light in which they portray older women.

And when she was married and had a child of her own, Sylva plucked the silver strands from her own hair and wove them into the silver ribbon, which she kept in a wooden box. When Sylva's child was old enough to understand, the box with the ribbon was put into her safekeeping, and she has kept them for her own daughter to this very day.

(Yolen 407)

When Jane Yolen published “The Moon Ribbon” in 1976, she was contributing to a world-wide search for great-great-grandmothers. Suddenly, it was not enough to know the history of men; a concerted search was begun for the history...