This new edition of the third volume in George MacDonald's Marshmallows Trilogy from 1872 is updated and introduced by Michael Phillips as Volume 14 in The Cullen Collection.
The Vicar’s Daughter, the 1872 sequel to The Seaboard Parish, follows the early married life of one of Harry Walton’s (fictional narrator of Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood) daughters. This third book in The Marshmallows Trilogy is representative of the rising interest women were taking in Victorian society. Written in the first person in the fictional guise of female authorship, its characterization of MacDonald’s friend and patron Lady Noel Byron is one of the noteworthy elements of the book.
Though The Vicar’s Daughter does not rank among MacDonald’s great novels judging from the standpoint of plot—it is essentially the fictional diary of a young mother writing about family life—MacDonald was paid generously for it, an indication of his rising reputation in the early 1870s. And the insights into child-rearing—and possible glimpses into the home of George and Louisa MacDonald with their own eleven sons and daughters—mark this title as both unique and valuable in the MacDonald corpus.
325 pages
