Here are the preferred readings of C.S. Lewis: - **Home** - **In brief** - **The story** - **Did you know** - **On screen** - **Going further** - **The Magician's Nephew** - **The story** - **Did you know** - **On screen** - **Going further** - **The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe** - **The story** - **Did you know** - **On screen** - **Going further** - **Prince Caspian** - **The story** - **Did you know** - **On screen** - **Going further** - **The Voyage of the Dawn Treader** - **The story** - **Did you know** - **On screen** - **Going further** - **The Silver Chair** - **The story** - **Did you know** - **On screen** - **Going further** - **The Last Battle** - **The story** - **Did you know** - **On screen** - **Going further**

• An idyllic childhood « among endless books » in Little Lea.
• George MacDonald’s Phantastes « baptised » his imagination in 1916.

The story

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes the large house of his childhood in Belfast, Little Lea, as a place of long hallways, attics, and especially books. There were books everywhere—in the study, the living room, the bedrooms, stacked up even in the attics. His parents read a great deal and allowed him almost anything. On rainy days, which were frequent in Ireland, the young Jack and his brother Warnie read and invented their own world, Boxen, populated by dressed-up animals.

What awakened the « joy »

Lewis recounts three childhood experiences that introduced him to what he called joy: an intense, sweet, and painful longing for something beyond this world.

• Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter gave him, as a very young child, a kind of autumnal nostalgia, as if autumn were a country.
• A poem by Longfellow, in which a voice announces that Balder the Beautiful is dead, opened to him what he called the « North »: a world of Scandinavian legends, cold and vast skies.
• Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, based on Wagner, extended this Nordic passion into his adolescence.

He also read the novels of Edith Nesbit, especially The Enchanted City, which deeply influenced him. Traces of her work can be found in The Magician’s Nephew, where Lewis even references Nesbit’s heroes, the Bastables. And he devoured Gulliver’s Travels, adventure stories, and fairy tales.

Phantastes, March 1916

The defining moment came one evening in March 1916, on a train platform. Lewis was seventeen years old. He bought a novel by George MacDonald, Phantastes, from the bookstall at Leatherhead station. He read it on the train and discovered a luminous holiness he could not yet name. He would later say that, on that evening, his imagination had been « baptised », long before the rest of his person. MacDonald would become his master: Lewis made him a character in The Great Divorce and published an anthology of his thoughts in 1946.

An Experiment in Criticism and Lewis’s advice

Between 1914 and 1917, at his tutor William Kirkpatrick’s home in Great Bookham, Lewis read Homer in Greek and the Latin poets in their original texts from the very first days. He then discovered—and never abandoned—:

• Malory and his knights of the Round Table;
• Spenser and The Faerie Queene, which some have said Narnia is a miniature version;
• Dante, whose Paradiso was for him a pinnacle of poetry;
• Milton and Paradise Lost, to which he devoted a book in 1942;
• William Morris and his chivalric and quest novels, such as The Well at the World’s End;
• Walter Scott, for the pleasure of being transported to another age;
• Jane Austen, whom he reread with pleasure and to whom he devoted an essay in 1954 (« A Note on Jane Austen », in the journal Essays in Criticism, October).

Later came the books of his friends, especially those by Tolkien, whose The Lord of the Rings he praised enthusiastically, and those by Charles Williams.

On screen

In 1962, a year before his death, the American magazine The Christian Century asked Lewis which books had most contributed to shaping his vocation and vision of life. He responded with ten titles, not including the Bible:

• Book — Author — In French
• 1 — Phantastes — George MacDonald — very little translated (to check)
• 2 — The Everlasting Man — G.K. Chesterton — The Everlasting Man
• 3 — The Aeneid — Virgil — widely translated
• 4 — The Temple — George Herbert — partial translations
• 5 — The Prelude — William Wordsworth — The Prelude
• 6 — Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy) — Rudolf Otto — The Idea of the Holy
• 7 — La Consolation de Philosophie — Boethius — widely translated
• 8 — Life of Samuel Johnson — James Boswell — Life of Samuel Johnson
• 9 — Descent into Hell — Charles Williams — not translated to our knowledge
• 10 — Theism and Humanism — Arthur James Balfour — not translated to our knowledge

The list surprises with its mix: two fantasy novels, two major English poems, a Latin epic, a sixth-century philosophical treatise, an eighteenth-century biography, a study on the experience of the sacred, and an essay by a former Prime Minister. All the books are Christian except The Aeneid. Rudolf Otto describes the experience of the « numinous », that awe mixed with fascination one feels before the divine. One might think of the effect Aslan has, who is « not a tame lion ». In 2015, a collective led by David and Susan Werther published a whole book dedicated to this list, C. S. Lewis’s List (Bloomsbury Academic).

Going further

If you like Narnia, Lewis’s readings make for a wonderful library. Start with Nesbit or MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin reads very well with children), move on to Malory or Morris, and save Boethius, Dante, and Otto for winter evenings. The two texts from the old site reproduced below offer detailed presentations of these authors.

See also

• Lewis’s sources of inspiration
• Myths and Narnia
• The Inklings, a literary club
• J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
• C.S. Lewis, far more than just Narnia
• What to read by C.S. Lewis after Narnia
• From *The Great Divorce* to Professor Kirke: Lewis’s influences and their fictional counterparts
• The last of the dinosaurs: a medievalist at Oxford and Cambridge, and what Narnia owes to his library