Apologist Through the Wardrobe
Wounded at Arras, he spent decades sharing a house with his dead friend’s mother, left atheism for Christianity, then married Joy Davidman and wrote raw grief under a pen name.
Writer, Literary Scholar & Christian Apologist
Lewis’s imaginary worlds and public arguments grew from the same lifelong reading, though they ask different things of us. Enter through Narnia, then follow the Oxford scholar into satire, wartime radio, a more difficult myth and the writing that followed Joy Davidman’s death.
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. He and his older brother Warren—Warnie—filled their childhood with books and the invented country of Boxen. Their mother Flora died when Lewis was nine. Schooling in England followed; later, private study with W. T. Kirkpatrick trained him to answer a claim with reasons. The child’s animal kingdom and the young man’s argumentative habits would both find places in his writing, without making the later books inevitable.
Lewis won an Oxford scholarship, but the First World War interrupted his studies. He reached the front in France in 1917 and was wounded at Arras in 1918. His friend Paddy Moore was killed; after the war Lewis lived for many years with Moore’s mother, Janie, and her daughter Maureen. That household belongs to the story of his adult life as surely as the college rooms do.
Lewis became a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925. He taught older English literature and learned to make unfamiliar imaginative worlds legible through their language and conventions. Scholarship remained a daily practice throughout the years of his popular writing.
Friendships with Tolkien, Owen Barfield and other Inklings put his assumptions about imagination and belief under pressure. Lewis moved from atheism to theism in 1929 and to Christianity in 1931; Surprised by Joy later told that story from his own perspective. Read the memoir as a crafted retrospective account, alongside the fiction and criticism, rather than as a key that solves every character.
The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, had traced the medieval tradition of courtly love; Lewis remained a literary historian as his audience widened. During the Second World War, he spoke to BBC listeners in short live talks on right and wrong, belief and conduct. The format pressed a teacher used to books and tutorials to build an argument for people hearing it once. Earlier groups of talks appeared as separate pamphlets; their revised combination became Mere Christianity in 1952. It presents a case for shared Christian belief, and its clarity should be weighed with the assumptions and objections the argument leaves open.
The Screwtape Letters, first serialised in 1941, took the opposite route: a senior devil instructs a junior one, and ordinary habits look strange under the reversed moral gaze. The Problem of Pain and The Abolition of Man likewise ask readers to examine suffering and moral education, but with different kinds of evidence. A good second step after the broadcasts is Screwtape; its jokes let a reader inspect Lewis’s method without mistaking fiction for a proof.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe appeared in 1950, the first published of seven Narnia books. Lewis drew on fairy tale, classical and northern myth as well as Christian imagery; Pauline Baynes’s illustrations gave the printed world a visual life of its own. Winter, a wardrobe and a talking lion make large moral questions available through the children’s choices, fear and curiosity. The books carry religious meaning, but their creatures and adventures also deserve to be encountered as story.
The series followed Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, adult fantasies in which planetary travel turns back toward questions about earthly power and institutions. The forms differ: the Space Trilogy argues through speculative worlds, Narnia through a child’s entry into one. After Wardrobe, follow the Narnia books in publication order to see Lewis vary his tone and scale, then take the Space Trilogy as a more argumentative neighbouring path.
Lewis took the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge in 1954 while keeping his Oxford home. There he shared a life with the American writer Joy Davidman, whom he married in 1956. The Wade Center traces her influence in Till We Have Faces and The Four Loves; that credit matters more than treating her as a late episode in his biography. Till We Have Faces retells Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Orual, whose accusations gradually expose the possessiveness within her love. It asks for slower, less reassuring reading than Narnia.
Davidman died in 1960. In A Grief Observed, first published as N. W. Clerk in 1961, Lewis records questions and reversals that his earlier account of suffering could not settle in advance. The contrast with The Problem of Pain is a worthwhile route into both books: argument and lived grief have different rhythms. He died in 1963. His scholarly work, especially An Experiment in Criticism and the posthumous The Discarded Image, offers another path through the medieval habits of mind that nourished the fiction.
Till We Have FacesLewis’s mature mythic novel, shaped through conversation with Joy Davidman and best read beyond the Narnia doorway.Explore book
J. R. R. TolkienThe Inklings, myth and the craft of imagined worlds
Joseph CampbellDifferent ways of connecting mythic images with modern life
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