At the Back of the North Wind

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 a prolific writer, now best known for his fantasies for children. A minister of the Congregational church, MacDonald resigned after a disagreement with his deacons and from 1853 earned his living by lecturing and writing. MacDonald’s influence on later writers has been significant. As W. H. Auden wrote, “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.”