George MacDonald

Andy Robertson · 22 Jan 2003, 13:19 · from urth-v0301.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Andy Robertson" <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) George MacDonald
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 13:19:28 -0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0301-2765 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0301/2765.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


He he he . . .

I love MacDonald,

But I agree, he's DEFINITELY kinky.



But it's the Goddess, you see.   Mother R*d**bt.  :)


She demands the status of divinity.

And if you won't worship her, she turns into a soul/semen-sucking Lilith -
or an evil Mother in the sea.



Actually Macdonald's most joyful and peaceful Fairy-Stories are the CURDIE
books, which contain a wonderful image of the Lady.  He was from time to
time able to recognise her divinity without guilt or fear.   Wolfe has never
quite managed it.

    Andy R


----- Original Message -----
From: "Nigel Price" <nigel.a.price at virgin.net>
T
> Years ago, I did a dissertation on Macdonald and read all his fantasy
novels
> and stories and a chunk of his literary criticism and mainstream Victorian
> fiction too. To quote one of my children's favourite phrases, "it did my
> head in." Some of his stories were good - I liked "The Golden Key" for
> example - but most of his work is verbose, poorly structured and mawkishly
> sentimental. Some of it is also, frankly, perverse. I never did really
> understand what Lewis saw in him.
>
> So imagine my horror when I read the following in Nutria's interview with
> Wolfe ("That's his name Jim, but not spelt as we know it!"):
>
> >>JJ: Now you are reading George McDonald?
>
> >>GW: Yes, Lilith. I had not read anything
> >>except Curdie and the Goblin and At the
> >>Back of the North Wind and those types,
> >>and they are quite good but they are
> >>basically fairy stories. I had read others
> >>that were about that good, but I don't think
> >>they had any great theological impact, any
> >>great feeling from that standpoint.
>
> I agree entirely with Wolfe's verdict on the main body of Macdonald's
work,
> but, frustratingly, he doesn't say what he thought of "Lilith". Now that
you
> mention it, though, I can see some points of overlap for Wolfe. Other
> worlds, ambiguous goddess/queens...and Lilith, if I recall, has some
> inhuma-like characteristics...She turns into a blood sucking white slug or
> worm at night. As in the famous C L Moore story "Shambleau", however,
> MacDonald is deliberately vague...Oh dear, how do I put this?...about what
> it is exactly that Lilith sucks...



--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net