Diamond, son of a poor coachman, is swept away by the North Wind -- a radiant, maternal spirit with long, flowing hair. His life is transformed by a brief glimpse of the beautiful country -- at the back of the north wind.

This Victorian fairy tale has enchanted readers for more than a hundred years, and combines a Dickensian regard for the working class of mid-19th-century England with the invention of an ethereal landscape. MacDonald wrote this story for his children, and it was also the favorite book of Mark Twain's children. However, although this is a children's book, there is so much that adults can get from it.

The story is about a boy who meets North Wind, a lovely ancient female embodied in the bitter, wintry wind, who serves as an emissary from God. This is truly a story for the childlike, as is all MacDonald’s works, but will appeal to today’s child much less than in the 19th century. North Wind is a metaphor for suffering in the world that has some intelligence behind the façade of senselessness, and the wind is described as only one of the various forms that God’s messengers may assume to reach us, depending on how ready we are, to help us ‘become who we are’. As far as the origin of pain, suffering, and so-called ‘misfortune’, not even North Wind can say what it all means, acknowledging a more remote antecedent of sense behind the sense. The closest North Wind can come to understanding it all, and maybe the closest MacDonald can get to it, is as a song:

"I will tell you how I am able to bear [the suffering of others], Diamond: I am always hearing, through every noise [and suffering], through all the noise I am making myself even, the sound of a far-off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odor of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it."

When little Diamond questions North Wind about why she isn’t as good to others as she is to him, the answer deftly slams the forward dialogue into reverse:

Diamond: Why shouldn't you be good to other people as well as to me?

North Wind: That's just what I don't know. Why shouldn't I?

Diamond: I don't know either. Then why shouldn't you?

North Wind: Because I am.

Lest he give up there, North Wind ends with, “Besides, I tell you that it is so, only it doesn't look like it. That I confess freely. Have you anything more to object?”

The first half of the book is a bit fantastical with Diamond’s meeting the wind and such, but the second half of the book is mostly preoccupied with Diamond’s earthly struggles.

George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister. He was educated at Aberdeen University and after a short and stormy career as a minister at Arundel, where his unorthodox views led to his dismissal, he turned to fiction as a means of earning a living. He wrote over 50 books.

Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, MacDonald inspired many authors, such as G.K. Chesterton, W. H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle. Lewis wrote that he regarded MacDonald as his "master": "Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later," said Lewis, "I knew that I had crossed a great frontier." G. K. Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence." Elizabeth Yates wrote of Sir Gibbie, "It moved me the way books did when, as a child, the great gates of literature began to open and first encounters with noble thoughts and utterances were unspeakably thrilling." Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, became friends with him, and there is some evidence that Twain was influenced by MacDonald.