Story Re-readability: It may not be the easiest reread, due to MacDonald’s peculiar style, but it probably should be in order to better understand its underlying meanings.

Reason for Finishing: An entrancing and utterly unique, unpredictable story, full of the beauty, the gravitas, and possibly the underlying reality of dreams. Lilith was the next I could get my hands on. Reason for Beginning: After reading MacDonald’s own Phantastes, I determined to read any work of his that I could get my hands on. Raven, to a mirror that transports him to an otherworld, where he is confronted with the truth of his own soul and with the very mystery of evil itself. Vane is led by a strange old librarian, Mr. Spoiler-free Synopsis: In his large and mostly empty home, young gentleman Mr. Published: 1895 (making this a piece of Victorian literature) And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man…Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. What he does best is fantasy-fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling…But this does not quite dispose of him even for the literary critic. But he does not maintain this level for long.

There are indeed passages where the wisdom and (I would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise, weighty, economic acquires a cutting edge. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank-perhaps not even in its second. Lilith is equal if not superior to the best of Poe.

Lilith by George MacDonald