The Golden Key

I still remember the quiet afternoon at work at Matthias Media (one element of my job there was just to be there, so I wasn't slacking off at this point) when I took The Golden Key, by George MacDonald, off the eclectic shelf full of books that Phil Miles left in our office while he went to Japan, and read it. And I still remember that indescribable feeling of having actually been someone else - of having been entranced and taken somewhere completely outside the interior of that office. W.H. Auden writes of this particular book "History, actual or feigned, demands that the reader be at one and the same time inside the story, sharing in the events and feelings narrated, and outside it, checking these against his own experiences. A fairy tale like The Golden Key, on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must be for him no other". That is unwittingly what happened to me the afternoon I opened that book.

C. S. Lewis writes of the kind of writing MacDonald does:

To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can co-exist with great inferiority in the art of words - nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts ... It produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets ... It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having ... hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions ... and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.

Auden also reaffirms C. S. Lewis' sentiments from an earlier post in saying "To me, George MacDonald's most extraordinary, and precious, gift is his ability, in all his stories, to create an atmosphere of goodness about which there is nothing phony or moralistic. Nothing is rarer in literature".

All of the above taken from the Afterward to The Golden Key by W. H. Auden.