George MacDonald most influenced C.S. Lewis’s Christian imagination through works such as Phantastes. MacDonald was a Scottish author and Congregationalist minister whose fantasy, fairy tales, sermons, and theological writing made a powerful impression on Lewis.
Lewis encountered Phantastes as a young man and later described reading it as a life-changing experience. He valued MacDonald’s ability to use imaginative stories to communicate spiritual realities without reducing them to simple lessons. Lewis’s appreciation appears in his anthology George MacDonald: An Anthology, which he edited and introduced in 1946.
MacDonald’s influence did not mean that Lewis copied his plots or characters. Instead, it helped shape Lewis’s understanding of myth, imagination, holiness, and the way stories can prepare readers to recognize truth. Lewis also admired authors such as Dante, John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and G.K. Chesterton, but MacDonald held a particularly important place in his spiritual and imaginative development. Phantastes is sometimes confused with a Lewis title because both authors wrote influential Christian fantasy, but it was published by MacDonald in 1858.