Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy

Michael Partridge was born in what he likes to call the East Anglian part of Essex and now lives in Cheshire. In 1995 he created The Golden Key web site (www.george-macdonald.com), online home to the George MacDonald Society where he is responsible for membership and online presence. A Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute, he retired after 40 years in insurance and has recently completed a Graduate Diploma in Theology with the Westminster Theological Centre/ University of Chester with whom he is now continuing his MA studies.

Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson is an independent scholar based in the Ottawa Valley, Canada, and director of the Linlathen Lectures. Her doctorate at University of St Andrews, Scotland, was on the 'Relational & Revelational Nature of MacDonald's Mythopoeic Art'. She has tutored students in Inklings studies in Oxford, and currently lectures internationally on MacDonald, Tolkien, and Lewis. Dr Jeffrey Johnson is on the Advisory Board of the Inklings journal VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review, a member of the Canadian Inklings Institute, and a regular contributor to ArtWay journal. A list of her publications and lectures may be found at kirstinjeffreyjohnson.com, and her book Storykeeper: The Mythopoeic Making of George MacDonald is forthcoming. She also wrote the introduction and afterword for the Romanian translation of The Golden Key (Aula Magna, 2016), and is one of the MacDonald specialists in Andrew Wall's documentary, The Fantasy Makers: Tolkien, Lewis, & MacDonald (2018).

An honorary Professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and Regius Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, his academic honours are too many to name. Stephen was born in Sierra Leone, educated in Canterbury, studied both at Oxford & Cambridge (with CS Lewis as one of his tutors), and taught in Nigeria before completing a Ph.D. in Cambridge in 1968. He continued to teach in universities quite literally around the world in such countries as the U.S., Australia, Singapore, Denmark, Italy, France, Romania, Denmark, and of course England and Scotland (and was a guest lecturer in many many more). He was Chair of English at the Australian National University and Director of the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor (in addition to being a professor there). He was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the English Association, Chairman of the U.K. Higher Education Foundation, President of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology, and President of the George MacDonald Society.