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The Portent and Other Stories

George MacDonald

Book Overview: 

This is the story of a daring college student's quest to win the icy heart of a beautiful girl. Unfortunately, the girl is the daughter of a cunning and sadistic master artist, who takes the student as an apprentice with the express intent of torturing the youth with his own hopeless love. The story is set in late 16 century Prague, amid mysterious happenings and the terrifying rumors of a vampire on the loose.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .Soon she expressed a desire to know something of figures. We commenced arithmetic. I proposed geometry along with it, and found the latter especially fitted to her powers. One by one we included several other necessary branches; and ere long I had four around the schoolroom table—equally my pupils. Whether the attempts previously made to instruct her had been insufficient or misdirected, or whether her intellectual powers had commenced a fresh growth, I could not tell; but I leaned to the latter conclusion, especially after I began to observe that her peculiar remarks had become modified in form, though without losing any of their originality. The unearthliness of her beauty likewise disappeared, a slight colour displacing the almost marbly whiteness of her cheek.

Long before Lady Alice had made this progress, my nightly struggles began to diminish in violence. They had now entirely ceased. The temptation had left me. I felt certain that for we. . . Read More

Community Reviews

I am a fan of George MacDonald, and would like to read all his works. This was not one of his strongest novels, and the reasons are structural. In the early chapters, the narrator/protagonist is introduced to a ghostly tale of love and revenge which seems to bear mysteriously on his own fate, but th

Like anything George MacDonald has penned, I deem this a great book. The sole reason being that it has ingrained within the heart of it the soul of a man whose deep respect for duty has only aroused and fed the HONEST, all-consuming, sincere, FLAMING and TRUE loyalty to the love that is of ideal nat

So sorry. It's my first book of George Mac Donald and it had been really boring. Sometimes I had been at the point of abandon it.
I wanted to read this author because C.S Lewis

Though a slower-paced plot than most of his novels, here MacDonald explores the idea of second sight, or in this novel, second hearing. Young Duncan Campbell can hear the fateful sound of a ghostly horse that ties to the violent past of his family line. I enjoy how MacDonald ties Scottish folklore t

I just recently finished reading George MacDonald's novella called The Portent, originally published in 1864. It is a fascinating story about the Celtic second sight, inspired by gothic literature, Scottish highland ghost stories, and it also had a great love story between Alice and Duncan which was

The story of a young Scots gentleman of around 1810. He takes a job as a tutor for an English lord while hoping to get a commission in the Scots Grays. He is haunted by occasional flashes of Second Sight, and receives some advice from an old Scotswoman with a good dose of it. A story of how love can

I agree with some other reviewers about the potential of this book. The beginning ghostly tale was so wonderful and I expected it to tie into the story of Duncan and Alice so much more than it did. It really does make me think that MacDonald had planned to do more with it. This story was still very

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