Call number
Status
Call number
Pages
Description
George MacDonald was a 19th century Scottish writer, poet and minister. He is best known for his fairy tales and fantasies. His most popular works are Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, and Lilith. The fisherman's lady was originally published as Malcolm. This historical novel is set in nineteenth-century Scotland. MacDonald spins a tale "shadowed by God" as he traces the stormy love between a Scottish fisherman and a beautiful high-spirited girl. An excerpt from Malcolm reads "This lowland village has come upon strange times . . . for a young woman has died in sorrow -- and the mad hunchback laird, Stephen Stewart, scurries across the heath, crying out to the skies to tell him where he came from. And now Malcolm's father warns against the woman Malcolm already knows to have strange and disturbing ways -- and to have hurled curses at him!" The Marqui's Secret is the sequel.… (more)
Publication
Original publication date
ISBN
Collection
Subjects
User reviews
A George MacDonald book "Malcolm" written in 1875 and published by Henry S.
Edited and re-published as "The Fisherman's Lady" by Michael Phillips in 1982.
"I'll try, my lord; it's the business of every man, where he can, to loosen the chains of injustice and let the oppressed go free."
Time for some confessions.
Confession One: I started reading this Gothic, Christian classic, The Fisherman's Lady by author George
Yes, the beginning is quite chilling, with the discovery of a woman's corpse in an old house, and the secrets lurking throughout the story turn out to have much to do with a young Scottish fisherman, Malcolm.
Confession Two: as a lover of classic literature, I so wanted to love this novel. So much so that I held on for these past years, coming back to the book periodically, trying and retrying to get into it. It took this long for me to finally reconcile myself to the fact that this read just isn't for me.
The only parts that really got me were certain declarations from almost-too-perfect-but-still-admirable Malcolm—such as his declaration about injustice and freeing the oppressed, which I've been dying to put in a book review since the moment I first read it. Years ago.
Confession Three: because I still want to read the sequel, I skimmed a substantial chunk of this novel to see how it would turn out. And how it turns out is rather…weird. Weird in a good way but mostly weird in a…weird way.
But I can handle that kind of weirdness now and then, especially in a book as old as this one. Gotta love classic lit. On to the sequel! (I'm pretty sure "on" won't be two and a half years from now.)