The Chronicles of Narnia : The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — About CS Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1898, the second son of A.J. Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora Augusta (Hamilton), a promising mathematician. Lewis had been very close to his mother, who taught him to love books and encouraged him to study French and Latin. His mother died in 1908 when Lewis was just nine years old. Shortly thereafter, Lewis was sent to boarding school.

Lewis began his lifelong fascination with reading and writing early in his childhood. As he writes in his autobiographical book, Surprised by Joy (1955): "I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also of endless books ... In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves." His attic "study" also afforded him with a place to create his own tales: "Here my first stories were written and illustrated. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures: dressed animals and knights in armor."

Lewis graduated from University College, Oxford, in 1923, an education that he interrupted to serve in WWI. He was a tutor and lecturer in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years (1925-54). From 1954 to 1963 he was professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His lectures were crowded; he had a phenomenal memory, and he could speak spontaneously about Greek and Latin texts without notes. With J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis formed a literary group called The Inklings, which took shape in the 1930s. Their Tuesday lunchtime sessions at the Eagle and Child pub became a well-known part of Oxford social life.

The books in The Chronicles of Narnia series have proven to be amongst the most beloved of Lewis's works. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the second of seven books in the series and tells the story of a group of young siblings who come into contact with the mysterious other world of Narnia. On writing this and other books, Lewis said, "I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing."

Bookmark In: