George MacDonald was born in 1824 in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, into a Calvinist household shaped by the Scottish Congregationalist tradition. He studied natural philosophy and chemistry at King's College, Aberdeen, before training for the ministry. In 1850 he accepted a pastoral charge at Trinity Congregational Church in Arundel, England, but his tenure was brief. Members of his congregation grew uneasy with his refusal to preach a God of narrow retribution, and disputes over his salary forced his resignation within three years. He never held a settled pastorate again, supporting his large family instead through lecturing and an extraordinarily prolific literary career.
MacDonald wrote in the middle decades of Victorian England, a period when industrial expansion, biblical criticism, and Darwinian theory were pressing hard against inherited religious certainties. His response was not apologetics in any conventional sense but imagination. He produced realistic Scottish novels such as *Robert Falconer* and *Alec Forbes of Howglen*, as well as works of fantasy—*Phantastes*, *Lilith*, and the celebrated children's books featuring the mysterious figure of the North Wind—that treated the spiritual life as something luminous, strange, and demanding rather than merely consoling.
His theological vision centered on the fatherhood of God and the inexhaustible patience of divine love. He was drawn to the universalist currents in F.D. Maurice and to the mystical tradition running through Jakob Böhme, and he read Dante and George Herbert with sustained attention. His fiction did not illustrate doctrine so much as embody a quality of spiritual longing, a sense that holiness presses on ordinary life from just beyond its edges. He distrusted any theology that made God smaller than the best human parent.
His legacy rests largely on what he made possible for others. C.S. Lewis credited *Phantastes* with baptizing his imagination years before his conversion, and Lewis later edited an anthology of MacDonald's work, calling him his master. W.H. Auden, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien each acknowledged his influence, and his books have never gone out of print.