The Motherhood of the Childless

George MacDonald constantly engages with the theme of motherhood. The topic appears in the theology of his sermons, literary criticism, fantasy tales, stories for children, and novels for adults. For MacDonald, motherhood is not inherently connected with pregnancy or giving birth, a perspective that was shaped by his experience of losing his mother at a young age but being loved as a child by his spinster aunt and stepmother. Motherhood, with its primary characteristic of love, belongs to all women. The more a woman increases in love and in the quality of her motherhood, the less she will care whether the children she mothers are her own or another’s. This paper argues that even as he develops an ideal of feminine motherhood, MacDonald affirms a primarily non-normative maternal role when he claims that a childless woman can be more truly a mother than a woman who has borne children.