This was George MacDonald’s first full-length Scottish adult novel following a five-year publishing hiatus. Though a mere “romantic story” in the eyes of some, David Elginbrod was enormously successful and almost immediately catapulted MacDonald’s career forward.

Within a decade, MacDonald was among the top echelon of British novelists. Though he continued throughout the remainder of his lifetime to write and publish poetry, he would primarily be known to the reading public as a “Victorian novelist.”

It is in David Elginbrod that the character Robert Falconer makes his first public appearance, though in fact his very first appearance came several years earlier in MacDonald’s first fictional effort, a novel called Seekers and Finders. This first novel was rejected by MacDonald’s publisher, was never published, and the manuscript subsequently destroyed by MacDonald’s sons.

[Original Print: 1863, Hurst & Blackett]