C. S. Lewis once wrote, “I was brought back … [from atheism to Christianity] by the strong influence of two writers, the Presbyterian George MacDonald and the Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton.” He described many times his first experience of reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes and its effect on his life. One such account is given in The Great Divorce, published in 1945, where he recounts an imaginary trip to heaven where George MacDonald is his guide:

I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writing had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life. I tried to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connection with it, how hard I had tried not to see that the true name of this quality which first met me in his books is Holiness.

Elsewhere, describing his conversion, he wrote, “George MacDonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity.” References to MacDonald’s books run through C. S. Lewis’s correspondence. What starts as literary appreciation – discussed in lengthy exchanges with his childhood friend Arthur Greeves – becomes a spiritual touchstone. After C. S. Lewis’s conversion, and as he became increasingly well-known as a Christian apologist, he was frequently asked to recommend books that would help other seekers, and as often recommended George MacDonald. In 1946 he published a collection of 365 short excerpts from MacDonald’s works, writing in the preface:

In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it.

The excerpts from the preface included below offer additional biographical information and, taken together with the selections from his letters, show both how much George MacDonald meant to C. S. Lewis and how MacDonald’s value to him was as a guide to understanding and following the gospel.