Mise En Abyme and the Ontological Uncertainty of Magical Events in At the Back of the North Wind

George MacDonald’s novel At the Back of the North Wind tells the story of a boy’s magical journey with a mysterious figure, the North Wind, who reveals to the boy his spiritual life. this novel has been categorised as fantasy, in spite of the fact that it ‘has a very real setting...which is London sometime during the middle of the nineteenth century’ (Reis 1972, p.82). Simply defined, fantasy is a story in which magical events actually take place in the story world, while they are unlikely to happen in reality, in contrast to realistic stories in which ‘everything... must conform to our sensory experience of the real world’ (Attebery 2004, pp.295-296).