Alec Forbes of Howglen
1865
In the gray Scottish village of Howglen, a boy named Alec Forbes grows up in the shadow of death, surrounded by lives shaped by loss and the stubborn persistence of joy. When the novel opens at James Anderson's funeral, we enter a world where grief is ordinary and survival is quiet heroism. Young Annie, fragile and grieving, finds strange comfort in the company of her cow Brownie, while Alec navigates the complicated terrain of childhood in a place where the earth is hard and kindness is scarce. George MacDonald, the Victorian mystic who would later mentor C.S. Lewis, writes with a poet's ear for dialect and a theologian's attention to the sacred hidden in ordinary things. This is Scottish realism before it became grim, suffused with light and humor even as it confronts mortality. The novel asks what it means to grow up in a community bound together by shared sorrow, and how children find their way toward grace in the absence of easy answers. It endures because it captures something true about the texture of rural Scottish life, and about the peculiar resilience required to become good in a world that does not make it easy.
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“It is because the young cannot recognize the youth of the aged, and the old will not acknowledge the experience of the young, that they repel each other.””
— George MacDonald
“Even Annie did not then know that it was the soul's hunger, the vague sense of a need which nothing but the God of human faces, the God of the morning and of the starful night, the God of love and self-forgetfulness, can satisfy, that sent her money-loving, poverty-stricken, pining, grumbling old aunt out staring towards the east. It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know what they look for in reality is their God! This is that for which their heart and their flesh cry out.””
— George MacDonald
“Sorrow herself will reveal one day that she was only the beneficent shadow of Joy. Will Evil ever show herself the beneficent shadow of Good?””
— George MacDonald
“he was more grateful for Truffey's generous forgiveness than he would have been for the richest living in Scotland. Such forgiveness is just giving us back ourselves”
— George MacDonald
“He never married. But he wrote a good book.””
— George MacDonald
“At length, one lovely morning, when the green corn lay soaking in the yellow sunlight, and the sky rose above the earth deep and pure and tender like the thought of God about it, Alec became suddenly aware that life was good, and the world beautiful . . . One of God's lyric prophets, the larks, was within earshot, pouring down a vocal summer of jubilant melody. The lark thought nobody was listening but his wife; but God heard in heaven, and the young prodigal heard on the earth.””
— George MacDonald
“He did not torture himself with vain attempts to hold his brain as a mirror to his heart, that he might read his heart there. The heart is deaf and dumb and blind, but it has more in it”
— George MacDonald
“For the absence of human companionship in bestial forms; the loss of green fields, free to her as to the winds of heaven, and of country sounds and odours; and an almost constant sense of oppression from the propinquity of one or another whom she had cause to fear, were speedily working sad effects upon her.””
— George MacDonald
“A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.””
— George MacDonald
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MacDonald, George. Alec Forbes of Howglen. Lex, lex-books.com/book/alec-forbes-of-howglen-40198b24-07b8-401b-8e25-0a0016fca067.MacDonald, G. (1865). Alec Forbes of Howglen. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/alec-forbes-of-howglen-40198b24-07b8-401b-8e25-0a0016fca067MacDonald, George. Alec Forbes of Howglen. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/alec-forbes-of-howglen-40198b24-07b8-401b-8e25-0a0016fca067.
