“A BOOK is a door in, and therefore a door out!” So says the Raven in Lilith, George MacDonald’s remarkable fantasy, first published in 1895, and published again this year in a new edition of his collected works. This book, together with his earlier novel Phantastes, certainly proved to be a door into the world of luminous symbolic fantasy writing for authors such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and, more recently, for Ursula Le Guin, Susanna Clarke, and many others.

MacDonald showed that, once we willingly suspended our disbelief and entered into an author’s magical realm — a secondary world, a “sub-creation”, as Tolkien called it — then we could be taken out of ourselves, out of our contemporary routines and assumptions, and immersed in an imaginary world through whose atmosphere, images, and stories we are given an entirely new perspective. And, more crucially, he showed that we would take the door out from that imaginary world back into our own, strengthened, encouraged, and given new wisdom and insight.

Lilith itself is a fantasy that takes us out of our own world into another, and yet every detail of that other multi-dimensional world is, as MacDonald calls it, a “live thought”: every image is an emblem that speaks of more than itself, one that becomes an image with which and through which we can think.

Lilith is a strange and fantastical book. A librarian whom we meet at the beginning of the novel turns out to be a raven in the otherworld, but also, when we press deeper, he is Adam, and we will also meet Eve, and Lilith herself, a figure in Mesopotamian and Judaic mythology who is supposed to have been Adam’s first wife. In MacDonald’s era, she was the subject of both a poem and a painting by D. G. Rossetti, and, in MacDonald’s fantasy, she represents our fear of death — indeed, our fear of every little death, every form of letting go.

MacDonald’s Lilith is the one who most deeply resists, and yet finally learns to accept, the primal pattern of death and resurrection; for even the darkest images in this strange novel, like the worms that wisdom’s raven beak draws out from the soil of our subconscious, are flung up into the light and grow wings. From the great archetypes of Adam, Eve, and Lilith to the resonant and suggestive landscapes, the dry water courses beneath which, nevertheless, the water of life still flows; from the simple cottages where bread and wine are a transformative sacrament to the decaying palaces where every luxury is an empty corruption; from the live forest where the trees themselves and the birds of the air are living thoughts and prayers to the desolate and cruel city awaiting its transformation, every image in this book has a power of suggestion, of incipient symbol, which will challenge and deepen the reader’s self-understanding.

Not that any of these images are, in any sense, frigid allegory; on the contrary, this is, as Lewis affirmed, mythopoeic writing of the highest order. MacDonald is not squeezing pre-digested thoughts into some symbolic code, but, rather, letting the symbols themselves — the story itself — do their own work on us and in us, constantly suggesting and generating new insights.

The new edition of Lilith has illustrations by Gabrielle Ragusi, the contemporary Italian illustrator of fantasy and science fiction, which could help to bring this seminal and generative novel to a whole new generation. Who knows what future Lewis or Tolkien might first have their imagination aroused and then baptised here?