Lilith

In a haunted library, a young man named Mr. Vane glimpses the ghost of the former librarian — who appears now as a raven — and follows him through a tall mirror into a strange country MacDonald calls the region of the seven dimensions. So begins Lilith (1895), George MacDonald's last and darkest fantasy, the visionary companion to his Phantastes and the most profound book he ever wrote.

In that country Vane learns that the raven is Adam, the first man, keeper of a house of beds where the dead lie sleeping toward a true waking; that the lovely Little Ones never grow up because something has stopped their growth; and that the beautiful, terrible woman who rules the city of Bulika and drinks the life of children is Lilith, Adam's first wife, the oldest evil in the world. The book becomes the story of Vane's failures and his slow education — and of the long road by which Lilith herself is brought to the house of death, where even she may be unmade, remade, and at last laid down to sleep.

Built as a dream-vision on symbol and atmosphere rather than plot, Lilith draws on Genesis and Revelation, on the old folk legend of Lilith, and on the mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and presses MacDonald's lifelong conviction further than he ever pressed it elsewhere: that death is a sleep and not an end, that the self must die before it can truly live, and that even the oldest evil is not beyond remaking.

Obscure to its first readers and treasured ever since, it became one of the great visionary romances in English. C. S. Lewis called MacDonald his master and drew on Lilith in The Great Divorce and the Narnia books; W. H. Auden called it the equal of the best of Poe. To read it is to walk through the soul's own country.