The Downstretched Hand: Individual Development in George MacDonald's Major Fantasies for Children

In this study of MacDonald’s major children’s novels, Lesley Willis Smith demonstrates that MacDonald is fully aware of the need to integrate the unconscious into the conscious in order to achieve mature individuation. However, for MacDonald, true maturity and fulfillment can only be gained through a relationship with God. By exploring MacDonald’s integration of major biblical themes into his own myth, Smith reveals his literary genius and profound understanding of the human psyche. Readers will appreciate Smith’s interaction with other leading scholarship and in the context of other works by MacDonald, especially those written during the same time period. Included are sixteen images from five illustrators of MacDonald’s novels: At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie.

This outstanding book is the first to look at George MacDonald’s major fantasies for children in the light of the Bible, tracing submerged references that transform our understanding of these stories. Written in a straightforward and engaging style, the book holds the reader from first to last. Its theme is the maturation of the various protagonists of the tales, seen against a larger backcloth of death, resurrection and final judgement. Lesley Smith shows how incidents from MacDonald’s personal life, often harrowing, are changed into parts of a larger holy pattern in these works. In particular she shows how the resonance of these fairy tales derives both from alchemical thought in their past, and from archetypal imagery to be described by C.G. Jung in the future. Every page of this book gives us something new or recreates the known. Above all, its humane tone gives us a MacDonald who is always immediately present, whether as wise and suffering man, or as an artist forging the new genre of fairy tale.  

Colin Manlove, Author of

Scotland’s Forgotten Treasure: The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald

In The Downstretched Hand, Lesley Willis Smith employs Jungian psychology, historical context, and Biblical themes and images to interpret MacDonald’s three best-known children’s fantasies as maturation stories dramatizing the social, emotional and spiritual growth of their protagonists.  Smith analyzes each text repeatedly from different perspectives—a treatment rather like putting different filters over the same great photograph—to produce detailed and multi-layered readings that are yet unified, lucid and harmonious, Smith’s book leaves a reader awed, both by MacDonald’s genius as a religious fantasist and by Smith’s skill as a literary exegete.

Bonnie Gaarden,

Author of The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald

Smith's easy facility with MacDonald’s primary source material – the biblical text –illumines the careful crafting of these deceptively profound tales. Her thought-provoking analyses and insights will encourage further scholarship and dialogue.

Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, 

Co-Editor of  Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy

Lesley Willis Smith has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Alberta, Canada and was on the English faculty of the University of Guelph, Ontario, for many years, specializing in the 19^th century novel and children’s literature. She is currently a private scholar living in Canterbury, England.