David Elginbrod

After a publishing hiatus of five years, MacDonald's first full-length Scottish adult novel appeared. Though a mere "story" (and romance at that) in the eyes of some, David Elginbrod was enormously successful and almost immediately catapulted MacDonald's career forward. Within a decade MacDonald was near the top echelon among British novelists. Though he would continue all his life to write and publish poetry, it would throughout the remainder of his lifetime be as a "Victorian novelist" that he would primarily be known to the reading public. It is in David Elginbrod that the character Robert Falconer makes his first public appearance, though in fact his very first appearance came several years earlier in MacDonald's first fictional effort, a novel called Seekers and Finders. This first novel was rejected by MacDonald's publisher, was never published, and the manuscript was subsequently destroyed by MacDonald's sons.