• Home
• About

C.S. Lewis biography

I’m thoroughly enjoying the biography of C.S. Lewis by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper. I’ve been reading as much of Lewis’ as I can recently, starting with re-reading all the Narnian stories (I’m teaching two of them this year), and then reading some of his literary essays and lectures, followed by Till We Have Faces, The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Divorce of Heaven and Earth, and most recently the fascinating science-fiction trilogy. I vaguely recall reading one of them before, but this time the impression I got was deep and strong. Perelandra is a knock-out, and I hesitated to read the 3rd in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, as I was sure it could not be better than Perelandra. I was wrong, though Perelandra outdoes it for sheer beauty.

I’ve been particularly interested in Lewis’ thoughts on fairy-stories, and am now reading the seminal essay on this subject by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Lewis led me to his mentor, George Macdonald. I started with Macdonald’s fairy-tales and was impressed. “The Complete Fairy Tales” (a misnomer: it is far from complete; it does not include “The Princess and the Goblin” or “The Princess and Curdie” or “Lilith” or “Phantastes”, for example) includes one of the most perfect short stories I’ve read in a long time: Photogen and Nycteris.

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.