Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905-1931: Family Letters 1905-1931 Vol 1 Book

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 WardRead More