SOURCE: “George MacDonald's Fairy Tales,” in Christian Fantasy from 1200 to the Present, University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, pp. 164-82.

In the following essay, Manlove discusses Christian elements in MacDonald's fairy tales.

What we shall see with MacDonald and Kingsley is something quite new in the development of Christian fantasy. We shall find both trying by literary means to show, to make us feel, that God is present in nature and this world. In earlier literature God's existence could be assumed, but now it is necessary to prove it. And, in order to do this convincingly, one must start from the apparently empirical facts of existence, not from any biblical or quasi-biblical narrative involving a priori assumptions. Thus each presents us with an image of the baffling character of experience, through which God or the miraculous must be apprehended. This holds good even though the reality that MacDonald presents...