Description: Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, was a great admirer of George MacDonald's fairy-stories. When his children were young, he used to read The Princess and the Goblin to them in the evenings, before they went to bed. This edition contains the illustrations that must have provided visual inspiration.
Brief description: Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 - May 3, 1935) was a renowned American illustrator during the Golden Age of Children's illustration. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries she contributed her pictures to books and magazines. She illustrated stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, which included the long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and also the creation of all of the Good Housekeeping covers from December 1917 to 1933. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. [Wikipedia]