Clive Staples Lewis wrote stories that sent generations of readers through a wardrobe into Narnia. He was also a scholar of medieval literature, a wartime broadcaster and an Anglican lay theologian whose books made arguments about Christianity accessible to readers well beyond the university. His career joined these roles: the imaginative worlds and the public religious writing alike drew on his learning, while his teaching and friendships shaped his life in Oxford and Cambridge.
Belfast, the war and Oxford
Lewis was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898, before the partition of Ireland. His father, Albert, was a solicitor; his mother, Florence, had studied mathematics at Queen’s College Belfast. He grew up with his elder brother, Warren, in a house filled with books. As a boy, Lewis invented animal stories and, with Warren, an imaginary country called Boxen. He later recalled the force of books and solitude in shaping his childhood.
After his mother died in 1908, Lewis was sent to school in England. He attended several schools, including Malvern College, and later studied privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, whose rigorous teaching sharpened his reasoning. By his teenage years he had lost the Christian faith in which he had been raised. Norse and Greek mythology, Irish literature and the natural world became lasting sources of imaginative interest.
Lewis entered Oxford in 1917 and joined the British Army during the First World War. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, he served in France and was wounded in April 1918. After convalescence and demobilisation, he returned to Oxford. He gained first-class honours in three subjects: Greek and Latin literature, philosophy and ancient history, and English. In 1925 he became a fellow and tutor in English literature at Magdalen College, where he remained until 1954.
His return to Christianity came gradually. Lewis described the process in his autobiography Surprised by Joy: he accepted theism in 1929 and became a Christian in 1931. Conversations with friends, including J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, helped shape that change. Lewis became an Anglican, and his religious convictions would inform both his non-fiction and his fiction.
Scholar, teacher and member of the Inklings
Lewis’s academic work centred on medieval and Renaissance literature. The Allegory of Love (1936) examined allegorical love poetry and helped renew scholarly attention to medieval writing. He later wrote A Preface to Paradise Lost and The Discarded Image, an introduction to the medieval and Renaissance view of the world. These books reflect a scholar interested not just in individual texts but in the ideas and assumptions through which earlier readers understood them.
At Oxford, Lewis took part in the Inklings, an informal literary circle that included Tolkien and Lewis’s brother Warren. Its members met to read and discuss writing. Lewis’s friendship with Tolkien was intellectual as well as personal: both were interested in myth, language and the making of imagined worlds, though their work and beliefs were not identical.
In 1954 Lewis accepted the newly established chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge and became a fellow of Magdalene College. He kept his Oxford home and returned there at weekends. His move did not mark a break with the city where he had spent much of his adult life, taught, written and built close friendships.
Fiction, faith and the radio
The seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia were written between 1949 and 1954. The first published, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, appeared in 1950. The series combines fantasy with material drawn from classical mythology and British and Irish storytelling. Its central figure, Aslan, and the books’ treatment of sacrifice and redemption have led many readers to interpret Narnia through Lewis’s Christianity. Lewis himself resisted calling the books allegory: he described the Christian elements as a way of imagining what might happen in another world.
Narnia was only one part of his fiction. Lewis wrote the adult science-fiction Space Trilogy, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, as well as The Screwtape Letters, a satirical work presented as correspondence between two demons. His final novel, Till We Have Faces (1956), retold the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Alongside these works, his writing ranged from poetry and literary criticism to essays on theology and morality.
During the Second World War, Lewis spoke on BBC religious programmes from London, including broadcasts between 1941 and 1943. He aimed to explain Christian belief to a general audience, and the talks were later collected as Mere Christianity. The book argues for shared principles across Christian denominations rather than setting out the doctrines of one church. Other well-known works of Christian apologetics include The Problem of Pain and Miracles. Lewis’s wartime broadcasts established a public voice that was distinct from his academic one: direct, conversational and addressed to listeners facing the uncertainty of war.
Later life and remembrance
In 1956 Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman. She died of cancer in 1960. Lewis’s account of bereavement, A Grief Observed, first appeared under the pen name N. W. Clerk. He died in Oxford on 22 November 1963, aged 64, and was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry.
His work continued to find new audiences through adaptations for radio, television, stage and film. In 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, a memorial stone to Lewis was placed in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. A reading from The Last Battle formed part of the dedication service. The Oxford C. S. Lewis Society, founded in 1982, is among the organisations that continue to meet and discuss his work.
Why C. S. Lewis deserves a place in British Legacy
Lewis’s place in British literary history rests on more than the popularity of Narnia. His scholarship brought sustained attention to medieval writing and its systems of thought, while his teaching at Oxford and Cambridge connected that learning with generations of students. In fiction, he made mythology, theology and moral questions part of stories that have travelled across languages and media. Narnia’s readers can encounter it as an adventure, a work of Christian imagination, or both; Lewis’s refusal to reduce it to a simple allegory leaves room for those different readings.
His British connection is specific and substantial: born in Belfast, educated and established as a scholar in England, Lewis wrote and broadcast from within institutions and literary circles that shaped public and academic life. During the Second World War, his BBC talks took religious argument beyond the classroom and into listeners’ homes; later, Mere Christianity carried that project into book form. His legacy therefore joins literary invention to scholarship and public communication. The continued adaptation of his fiction and the memorial in Westminster Abbey show how his work remains part of Britain’s cultural conversation, while its readership extends far beyond Britain.
Sources
C. S. Lewis — Wikipedia revision 1379805846
Adapted in part from C. S. Lewis by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
