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At the Back of the North Wind

Illustrated by Arthur Hughes

Part of Everyman's Library Children's Classics Series

Author George MacDonald
Illustrated by Arthur Hughes
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Hardcover
$20.00 US
Knopf | Everyman's Library
On sale Oct 16, 2001 | 352 Pages | 9780375413353
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No children’s library is complete without this beautiful hardcover edition of the Victorian fairy tale that has enchanted readers for more than a hundred years.

George Macdonald’s timeless novel tells the magical story of Diamond, the son of a poor coachman, who is swept away by the North Wind—a radiant, maternal spirit with long, flowing hair—and whose life is transformed by a brief glimpse of the beautiful country “at the back of the north wind.” Published here alongside Arthur Hughes’s handsome illustrations from the original 1871 edition, At the Back of the North Wind combines a Dickensian regard for the working class of mid-19th-century England with the invention of an ethereal landscape.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.
GEORGE MACDONALD (1824–1905) was born at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where his father was a miller and his family Congregationalists. As a young man he was ordained a minister of the Congregational church but he resigned after a disagreement with his deacons over doctrine, and from 1853 he earned his living by lecturing and writing, often in poor health, which meant periodic travelling in search of purer air for his lungs. In 1851 he married Louisa Powell, with whom he spent a long and happy life, sadly ending in grief when three of his thirteen children died of tuberculosis and he suffered a stroke that deprived him of speech for his last five years.

He was a prolific writer, yet it is his fantasies for children that have survived. The Princess and the Goblin was the second of these, published first as a serial in Good Words for the Young, a periodical of which he became editor for a short time in 1869. About a hundred years later W.H. Auden wrote, "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 phone or moralistic. Nothing is rarer in literature." View titles by George MacDonald
Arthur Hughes View titles by Arthur Hughes

About

No children’s library is complete without this beautiful hardcover edition of the Victorian fairy tale that has enchanted readers for more than a hundred years.

George Macdonald’s timeless novel tells the magical story of Diamond, the son of a poor coachman, who is swept away by the North Wind—a radiant, maternal spirit with long, flowing hair—and whose life is transformed by a brief glimpse of the beautiful country “at the back of the north wind.” Published here alongside Arthur Hughes’s handsome illustrations from the original 1871 edition, At the Back of the North Wind combines a Dickensian regard for the working class of mid-19th-century England with the invention of an ethereal landscape.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

Author

GEORGE MACDONALD (1824–1905) was born at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where his father was a miller and his family Congregationalists. As a young man he was ordained a minister of the Congregational church but he resigned after a disagreement with his deacons over doctrine, and from 1853 he earned his living by lecturing and writing, often in poor health, which meant periodic travelling in search of purer air for his lungs. In 1851 he married Louisa Powell, with whom he spent a long and happy life, sadly ending in grief when three of his thirteen children died of tuberculosis and he suffered a stroke that deprived him of speech for his last five years.

He was a prolific writer, yet it is his fantasies for children that have survived. The Princess and the Goblin was the second of these, published first as a serial in Good Words for the Young, a periodical of which he became editor for a short time in 1869. About a hundred years later W.H. Auden wrote, "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 phone or moralistic. Nothing is rarer in literature." View titles by George MacDonald
Arthur Hughes View titles by Arthur Hughes

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