A few hours later,' said Lewis, 'I knew that I had crossed a great frontier.' G. Lewis wrote that he regarded MacDonald as his 'master': 'Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, MacDonald inspired many authors, such as G.K. He was educated at Aberdeen University and after a short and stormy career as a minister at Arundel, where his unorthodox views led to his dismissal, he turned to fiction as a means of earning a living. George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister. As the narrator says of a heavenly woman in this tale, 'She knew something too good to be told.' One senses the same of the author himself. The glory of MacDonald's work is that this surrender is both hard won (or lost!) and yet rippling with joy when at last experienced. At times almost forthrightly allegorical, at other times richly dreamlike (and indeed having a close connection to the symbolic world of dreams), this story of a young man who finds himself on a long journey through a land of fantasy is more truly the story of the spiritual quest that is at the core of his life's work, a quest that must end with the ultimate surrender of the self. In MacDonald's fairy tales, both those for children and (like this one) those for adults, the 'fairy land' clearly represents the spiritual world, or our own world revealed in all of its depth and meaning. Lewis said that upon reading this astonishing 19th-century fairy tale he 'had crossed a great frontier,' and numerous others both before and since have felt similarly.

Phantastes by George MacDonald