SOURCE: “Erasing Borders: MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind,” in Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity, University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 228-68.

In the following essay, Knoepflmacher explores the ways in which At the Back of the North Wind diverges from expected themes and forms of its genre.

As still was her look, and as still was her ee As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea, Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea. For Kilmeny had been she ken'd not where, And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare. .....But O, the words that fell from her mouth Were words of wonder and words of truth! 

—James Hogg, Kilmeny: A Fairy Legend

To me, George MacDonald's most extraordinary, and precious, gift is his ability, in all his stories, to create an atmosphere of goodness about which there is nothing...