"Lilith" by George MacDonald, Ch. 6-16

Angelina Stanford (0:18)

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Hello, and welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast. Today, we are going to continue on with our series on George MacDonald's Lilith, and cover chapters 6 through 16

And I am here with Ms. Addison Hornstra. Welcome back, Addison.

Addison Hornstra (1:44)

Yay, I'm back. It feels weird not to have Mr. Banks here with us.

Angelina Stanford (1:48)

That's right, the mysterious Mr. Banks is being extra mysterious. I should say that I'm really sorry that we didn't have a podcast last week.

I was struck down with a horrible, or fast but intense illness. And then my husband was struck down with it. And that is why he is not here today, because I think it was Hubris, y'all. I'm going to be honest with you, because he was like, I won't catch it. I have a great immune system. And boom, boom, that was Hubris, friends. The gods were like, I don't think so, not today. So he's now down.

And we decided that we weren't going to push it two weeks without a podcast. So here we are, Addison and I will do our best. And Mr. Banks and I talked a lot about these chapters over the week, and I will do my best to tell you what he would have said. And then we will share the other things for next week, because he's been doing some interesting research on George MacDonald and reading what people like WH. Auden have to say about him. Not surprised at all that Auden is a MacDonald fan. Not at all. I mean, Auden gets the imagination. He just gets it. He was like one of the first really intense supporters of Lord of the Rings when it came out.

Addison Hornstra (2:55)

Oh, that makes so much sense.

Angelina Stanford (2:57)

And he was Tolkien's student. He was Lewis's student. He was in World War II when the Grimm brothers were outlawed because anything German is bad. He wrote a great piece for the New York Times about why the Grimm brothers were important and why we needed them. Essentially, his point that when we remove all of the symbolic language from ourselves, that we're just going to be left with neuroses and other things like that, like that kind of language, we need this language and these ideas to be able to cope basically.

Anyway, I love Addison, so not surprising that he's a big George MacDonald fan. But nonetheless, Addison and I will try to carry on without the mysterious Mr. Banks.

I will try to carry on without the mysterious Mr. Banks. Doing this podcast without him feels like I've just lost my right arm. I'm at sixes and sevens, completely discombobulated because I don't have my partner sitting next to me. But I'll do my best, I'll do my best. All right, so just a quick reminder before we jump in. I presume if you were here last week, you heard us talk about Mr. Banks' webinar, which he did do and was fantastic, and Addison's upcoming webinar on The Prisoners of Time, which you've been doing a lot of fun research on.

Addison Hornstra (4:15)

I've been sharing some quotes with you.

Angelina Stanford (4:17)

You have, and I am really, really intrigued. I cannot wait for this ghost stories webinar. This is going to be on October 27th. Last week, we announced our conference for 2027, which will be in January, and that is live on our website now. So you can go to houseofhumaneletters.com.

You can click on the Conference tab, you can click on the Mini-Class Webinar tab, and you can find out more about all the stuff that we've got going on. Mr. Banks and I were laughing this week saying, well, anybody who was too confused about last week's episode probably isn't going to tune in for today's episode. But maybe if you're somebody who's like, I don't understand what's going on, but I'm just going to keep plugging through this podcast, I hope today's podcast is going to be a help to you. And we'll explain why that is in just a minute. But first, see, I was already going to forget the commonplace quotes. See, I told you, Mr. Banks is not here, and I'm going to be completely out of my routine.