The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

If you happen to be interested in the Art and Crafts movement and love wallowing in the atmosphere of weird stories, this is definitely the book for you. If, like most of the sane population, you want a logical story with well-written characters, probably not so much. Part of me hugely enjoyed this book (the part that loves Arthurian legends and mysterious stories), another part of me enjoyed this book on a historical level (Arts and Crafts ideas, thinking about what it says about the time it was written in) and part of me found it incredibly annoying (the part that doesn't like pretentious things or disempowered women). It is highly reminiscent of parts of The Chronicles of Narnia (this was one of Lewis's favourite books), and Morris is very good at creating an atmosphere of mystery and leaving things artfully unexplained. On the other hand, I don't know how some of the things that happen can make any sense to readers unfamiliar with Arts and Crafts ideas, I'm pretty sure most readers now will end up very bored and/or confused. The book operates with its own internal logic, that is in accordance with the theories William Morris engaged with (and got most of the late-Victorian artists and designers obsessed with). One thing I really didn't like was that it is an idealised medieval world, and the female characters are presented as the whore/virgin dichotomy, while in actual medieval romances, this is rarely the case. But I suppose it's just one of the endless fictions the Victorian era liked to manufacture about the past, and as that's what I'm interested in studying, it was noteworthy to me, though annoying.