This one arrived from Upstairs with the note that it is, depending on your position on these matters, either the first modern fantasy novel or a deeply peculiar Victorian prose experiment that no one asked for. Both are true. They may be the same thing.

William Morris was sixty when he wrote it. He had also, by that point, redesigned the English interior, translated the Icelandic sagas, run a revolutionary socialist organisation, founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and established his own private press to print books the way he believed books should be printed. He was, by most measures, done. He wrote the late prose romances — of which this is the first serious one — because they were the books he most wanted to leave behind. He was wrong about almost everything else he thought about his own legacy. He was right about these.

What I keep thinking about, having spent time with it this week, is the prose. It takes about twenty pages to stop noticing the thee and the belike. Then you stop noticing it, and something else happens. I am not sure I can describe what the something else is without sounding like I am overselling a 130-year-old book by a man who is now mainly famous for wallpaper. But there is a quality of attention the prose demands and then rewards that I do not find in more modern fiction very often. It asks you to slow down. When you do, the wood opens up.

Tolkien read it. Lewis read it as a boy and re-read it at thirty and wrote in his diary that he was embarrassed to discover how much of his adult imagination he could trace back to it. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about what that means for the book you think you are picking up and the book you will actually find.

The StoriesTyped Annotated Edition is on Kindle now. The full package — introduction, two critical essays on the novel’s place in the fantasy tradition and on what it is actually doing with its three female characters, biography, and the usual closing note from the basement — is in there. The YouTube introduction is up if you want to see the opening pages typed before you commit.

The wood, as I note in the introduction, is still there.

So am I, probably.

— G. H. Schreiber

26/04/2026