Mr. Vane, an orphan and heir to his family home and riches, is the protagonist of Lilith. Mr. Raven, the enigmatic librarian at his family's mansion, appears and claims to have known not just Mr. Vane's father but all his relatives before him. The librarian leads Mr. Vane through an antique mirror and into a "zone of the seven dimensions," where he investigates various hallucinatory representations of good and evil. Mr. Vane gets caught up in a cosmic war while travelling through this unusual place and must reconcile his notions of reality with his new understandings. In describing Mr. Vane's five excursions to this other planet, MacDonald eerily explores the ultimate mystery of evil.
"Most myths were made in prehistoric times…. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius…who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know." ~ C. S. Lewis