Vicar's Daughter Book

The fictional memoirs of Ethelwyn Percivale, daughter of a wise vicar and wife of a struggling painter, written in order to fulfill an obligation her father owes to a publisher, modest and gentle in tone and ambition, 'made up of pieces only of a quiet and ordinary life'.

Before I read it I was aware that it was the last part of trilogy, the first two installments of which were written by the vicar himself, but this didn't discourage me; I had been looking for any excuse to read another book by George MacDonald after enjoying Phantastes: A Faerie Romance.

This book is set very much in the real world though, and our narrator is not kidding when she defines her life as 'quiet and ordinary'. But for one episode in which her daughter is temporarily kidnapped, all that she really does is have the odd dinner party, receive a few visits from her parents, and have some discussions about God.

Though telling the story of her own marriage and motherhood, her book is really about an extraordinary friend of hers, Miss Marion Clare, a saintly young lady who has decided to live among the poor and tend to their spiritual needs.

As Miss Clare does for her friends, so George MacDonald does for his readers, for contemplating those questions about how God can be understood in the face of life, poverty, wealth and death is his concern as well as hers.

The novel was too uneventful to be entertaining to any but the theologically inclined, but MacDonald does have a subtle and appealing way at looking at those questions, a very worldly way. As Ethelwyn advises, we need to 'trust in Him as a real, present, living, loving being, who counts us of more value than many sparrows, and will not let one of them fall to the ground'.