Originally published in three volumes in 1864 by Hurst & Blackett, London, Adela Cathcart is MacDonald’s attempt to package a collection of short stories in the guise of a novel after the fashion of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
The collection is built around a group of snowbound travelers attempting to pass the time in a country house by sharing stories in hopes of distracting young Adela Cathcart from her illness.
Early in his career, MacDonald was trying different genres and storytelling methods, and this is a prime example of his creative experimentation. The included stories changed with a new edition in 1882. Some of MacDonald's well-known short stories made their first appearance in one of the two editions.
Adela Cathcart contains the following short stories woven into the text:
1. The Christmas Dinner
2. The Light Princess
3. The Bell
4. The School Master’s Story (also known as Birth, Dreaming, and Death)
5. Song (poems)
6. The Curate and His Wife
7. The Shadows
8. The Evening at the Curate (poems)
9. Percy and His Mother (poems)
10. The Broken Swords
11. My Uncle Peter
12. The Giant’s Heart
13. A Child’s Holiday (poem and story)
14. The Cruel Painter
15. The Castle
There are several editions of Adela Cathcart, with different combinations of stories included; we hope to present more information on the variant editions in the future, and welcome information on this subject.
(Source: The Cullen Collection)
Editions
The Cullen Collection Edition (abridged): paperback and kindle
Hardcover Edition (unabridged):
From Johannesen Printing & Publishing
Articles about Adela Cathcart
NORTH WIND ARCHIVE
The home page of the North Wind Archive can be accessed here.
“’The Cruel Painter’ as a Rewriting of the Shelley-Godwin Triangle”, by Jennifer Koopman
“’The Day of All the Year’: MacDonald’s Christmas Aesthetic”, by Daniel Gabelman
“Travelling Beastward: An Ecocritical Reading of George MacDonald’s Fairy Tales”, by Björn Sundmark
“Die Aufhebung in George MacDonald”, by Bonnie Gaarden
“Dreams, Fairy Tales, and the Curing of Adela Cathcart”, by F. Hal Broome
“The Stages in Adela Cathcart’s Cure”, by Nancy Mellon
WINGFOLD
Wingfold is a quarterly magazine that restores material by and about George MacDonald, in print since 1993. To subscribe, click here. To request any of the following articles that appear in back issues of Wingfold, contact Barbara Amell at b_amell@q.com.
Winter 2012
“1864 Review”