Amazon.co.uk Review
What does a seven-year old Irish boy's bobbing for apples have to do with a brilliant Oxford don's conversion to Christianity? Everything--when you consider they are the same person. The chief pleasure of this collection is in its cumulative power as it tells Lewis's story up to the point of his spiritual crisis. The volume ends with a fascinating letter detailing that final move to faith, the central event of Lewis's life; its analysis of Christianity as "a true myth" serves as a key to many of his later writings.
En route to conversion we see the young Lewis's unhappiness at school, his adolescent atheism and sexual fantasies, his soldiering in the Great War, his estrangement from his father, his unusual relationship with Mrs Moore, the mother of a close friend who died in the First World War, and his appointment as an English Fellow at Oxford. We see him meeting Yeats and befriending Tolkien. In short, it is Surprised by Joy in epistolary form.
Much of this correspondence has been published before in Letters (1988) and They Stand Together (1979). However, both those books have been out of print for years, and neither of them included Lewis's childhood letters to his father. This collection is the first in a planned three-volume series, covering the whole of Lewis's life. The dust-jacket contains one glaring error, declaring that Lewis fought at the Battle of the Somme. Tolkien did, but Lewis had not even enlisted at that time, as Walter Hooper's painstaking editorial work would have told the blurb-writer. This howler blots what is otherwise and in every respect an excellent collection. --Michael Ward
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
This three-volume collection brings together the best of C. S. Lewis's letters -- some published for the first time. This second volume covers the years from 1931-1949, charting Lewis' emergence as a great Christian thinker and apologist. C. S. Lewis was a most prolific letter writer and his personal correspondence reveals much of his private life, reflections, friendships and feelings. This collection, carefully chosen and arranged by Walter Hooper, is the most extensive ever published. In this great and important collection are the letters Lewis wrote to J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, Owen Barfield, Arthur C. Clarke, Sheldon Vanauken and Dom Bede Griffiths. To some particular friends, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Lewis wrote over fifty letters alone. The letters deal with all of Lewis's interests: theology, literary criticism, poetry, fantasy, children's stories as well as revealing his relationships with family members and friends. The second volume begins with Lewis quietly trying to lead a Christian life and writing his first major work of literary history, The Allegory of Love. He was unknown during the 1930s and at this time wrote some of his finest letters, mainly to his brother Warren and to his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves. Then he is 'discovered' by the BBC and the publishers Geoffrey Bles, resulting in the most popular works of Christian apologetics ever written. C. S. Lewis became a household name and from the 1940s onwards some of his greatest theological letters were written.
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