What's Mine's Mine — Volume 2
1824
In the wind-scoured Scottish Highlands of the 18th and 19th centuries, a way of life is dying. George MacDonald’s 1886 novel portrays the devastating Clearances through the intersecting fates of two families: the English Palmers, whose ruthless Mr. Palmer has torn Clan Ruadh from their ancestral lands, and the clan chief Alister Macruadh, whose people face starvation and dispersal. Within this landscape of loss moves Ian Macruadh, son, brother, and a man caught between his mother’s fierce Calvinism and his own hunger for something like grace. A parallel narrative threads through the volume: the harrowing story of a mother who, widowed and left with nothing, watches her children succumb to illness while her faith holds like a candle against the dark. MacDonald’s God speaks in mountain mist and loch water, in the patient faces of those who remain. This is a novel about what we owe each other when everything is being taken away, and what, if anything, waits beyond the last loss.
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“Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.””
— George MacDonald
“...for a man must leave father and mother to cleave to his wife - a principle commonly inverted by male presumption.””
— George MacDonald
“Belief that is not lived by is no belief at all, for belief involves what we do more than it does ideas.””
— George MacDonald
“No one can be living a true life to whom dying is a terror.””
— George MacDonald
“It is a good thing to desire to share a good thing, but it is not well to be unable alone to enjoy a good thing. It is our enjoyment that should make us desirous to share. What is there to share if the thing be of no value in itself? To enjoy alone is to be able to share. No participation can make that of value which in itself is of none. It””
— George MacDonald
