Clive Staples Lewis, writer, scholar and creator of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898. His father Albert James Lewis was a prosperous solicitor and his mother Florence Augusta (Flora) Hamilton came from an established Church of Ireland family and was a graduate in mathematics from what is now Queen's College Belfast. His older brother Warren (Warnie), born four years before Clive (known as Jack), was his closest childhood friend.
Lewis painted a vivid portrait of his childhood in his autobiography Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (1955). Living in a large house in the suburbs of Belfast, the brothers created their own imaginary world in the attic and dark spaces of their rambling home. They called their kingdom 'Boxen' and populated it with both human and animal inhabitants drawn from their love of the richly imaginative world of Edwardian children's fiction, especially the books of E. Nesbit. This enchanted existence came to a sudden end with the death of their mother from cancer in 1908. In a state of deep grief, Albert Lewis sent his sons to a series of boarding schools. This time was marred by unhappiness, the conditions at the schools were harsh and Lewis was left with a lifelong horror of the British public school system. But at Malvern College, to which he had won a scholarship in 1913, he discovered a love of Celtic and Norse literature. Things finally improved when his father decided to place him in the care of W.T Kirkpatrick, his own former teacher, with whom Lewis would spend two happy and formative years learning the classical languages and literature that would form the basis of his own distinguished career. Wider reading brought him into contact with the writing of George MacDonald, a major influence on Lewis's later works of fiction.
By now showing great academic potential, Lewis won a classical scholarship to University College Oxford. His studies were delayed however by his enlistment in the army. Gazetted to the Somerset light infantry and sent to the Western Front, he experienced the horrors of trench warfare and was wounded in the battle of Arras on 15 April 1918. Convalescence from this injury was a bleak and deeply pessimistic time for Lewis, and he would cite both his war experience and the early death of his mother as the causes of his atheism at this time. It was during his recovery that Lewis started an ambiguous relationship with the woman with whom he would spend the next thirty years of his life.
Janie Moore, an attractive divorcee in her forties, was the mother of his contemporary Paddy Moore who had been killed in action in France. The friends had made a pact that if either died, the survivor would look after the bereaved parent. Having returned to university in 1919, Lewis moved in with Janie and her daughter in Oxford, later together moving to 'The Kilns" in Headington on the city's outskirts. Even Lewis's brother was unsure of the precise nature of their relationship, but it is a reasonable assumption that Janie replaced the mother he had lost at such a young age and indeed the pair referred to each other as mother and son. Lewis's only recorded comment on the matter would come in Surprised by Joy, where he states that "my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully...avenged".
At Oxford, Lewis studied classical philosophy, history and literature, known as "Greats", for three years and then stayed on to study English literature. He was an excellent student attaining first class honours and winning the chancellor's English essay prize with an essay on optimism. However, he wasn't immediately offered a fellowship and took a post at his college lecturing in philosophy until in 1925 being elected a fellow and tutor in English language and literature at Magdalen College, a post he would hold for nearly thirty years.
It was in these early years at Oxford that Lewis established friendships with Owen Barfield, Nevill Coghill, Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien, all of whom, together with a number of others, would form the celebrated literary discussion group known as the 'Inklings", meeting weekly to discuss their work in progress. Dyson and Tolkien would have a significant influence on Lewis's decision to convert back to Christianity in 1931, a decision that would profoundly shape the rest of his life and work. Lewis examined this spiritual awakening in his allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Regress (1933). Three years later he would publish the major work that would secure his reputation as a literary scholar: The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936), which explored courtly love in medieval and Renaissance literature and won Lewis the Hawthornden Prize. A number of books followed and by the middle of the century he was regarded as one of the foremost scholars in his field.
Lewis's imaginative and creative urge was too great to be contained within the tight discipline of academia. In the late 1930s he would return to fiction, producing a trilogy of science fiction novels: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). But it was his newfound faith that was the real spur to his work and The Problem of Pain (1940) exploring why a loving God would allow suffering, was Lewis's first Christian apologetical work. It caught the attention of the director of religious broadcasting at the BBC who commissioned a series of radio talks by Lewis to be delivered to a national audience. Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe, broadcast during the darkest hour of World War Two, was enormously successful with the public. Three sequels followed: What Christians Believe, Christian Behaviour and Beyond Personality; together they were later collected in a revised four-part edition entitled Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis's broadcasts turned him into a celebrity, and together with a number of other works on Christian themes including the novels The Screwtape Letters (1942), dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, and The Great Divorce (1945), gained him a major following in Christian communities throughout the world.
In 1948 Lewis began work on the series of books for that would become some of the greatest and most enduring classics of children's literature ever written. The Chronicles of Narnia, comprising The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), The Magician's Nephew (1955) and The Last Battle (1956), are recognised by critics to be Christian allegories, the Christlike figure being represented by the lion Aslan, but Lewis disliked stories with morals and avoided an instructing tone. They were strongly influenced by the mythology of Celtic literature, and contain oblique references to the works of Dante, John Milton, Edmund Spenser and George MacDonald. But there was also a more personal basis for these fantastical stories and they would be enhanced by the inclusion of aspects of Lewis's own childhood, like Caspian's early loss of his mother, and the world of Narnia mirrored his childhood creation of Boxen with its talking animals and pervasive sense of magic. All seven books have been in continuous print since 1956, selling over 120 million copies, and have been widely adapted for stage and screen.
