Surprised by C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald and Dante: A Batch of Original Discoveries

by Kathryn Lindskoog

TEXT CORRECTION TO SUPRISED BY C.S. LEWIS, GEORGE MACDONALD AND DANTE: There is a typographical error on page 29. The sentence is printed: "If these claims are true, they are of importance to no one." The sentence should read: "If these claims are true, they are of supreme importance to everyone; if they are not true, they are of importance to no one."

There are 23 essays in Surprised by C S. Lewis, George Macdonald, And Dante...An Array of Original Discoveries

Here is a sampling.

Unlikely as it sounds, in an old book in the year 2000 Perry Bramlett came across an essay by C. S. Lewis that had never been discovered before. Lewis had been dead for thirty-seven years, and the essays published in his lifetime had been painstakingly sought out and gathered and entered in his bibliography. (If this essay had come to light soon enough, it would have fit perfectly in the collection God in the Dock.) I tell all about it.

Through the years I've occasionally heard readers of That Hideous Strength wonder why C. S. Lewis chose to name his protagonists the company of St. Anne's, and I was certainly no help. (In the story a few people are brought together at St. Anne's Manor in a village called St. Anne's on the Hill in order to save England from something dark and hideous.) Forty-five years after I first read That Hideous Strength I suddenly came across the fascinating answer.

What do C. S. Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress (1933) and John Updike's Rabbit ls Rich (198 1) have in common? They both drew upon Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt(1922). And what did Sinclair Lewis secretly draw upon? Here is a revelation indeed.

Until now, no one has noticed the fact that George MacDonald's fairy tale "The Carasoyn" (1871) was progenitor of The Secret Garden (19 11), which in turn was a source of My Antonia (1918) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). It's a delicious story.

C. S. Lewis had the basic idea for Till We Have Faces brewing at the back of his mind for over thirty years before he wrote it. When he did, it flowed out of him very quickly and was immediately his favorite of all his books. But it is a mysterious book, with layers of meaning that puzzle many readers. The key to some of that meaning resides in what I discovered about the names Ungit and Orual and a poem by C. S. Lewis that has been accidentally hidden from the public for sixty years.

Although I made this particular discovery several years ago few readers of C. S. Lewis know what he thought of Huckleberry Finn. More importantly, few readers of Mark Twain and George MacDonald know what part they played in each other's lives and how MacDonald contributed to Huckleberry Finn so I included this in my new collection.

The year after he first read Paradise C. S. Lewis became a believing Christian, and he was clearly influenced by Dante for the rest of his life. There are traces of The Divine Comedy throughout his writing, from The Pilgrim's Regress, his first Christian book, to Letters to Malcolm, his last.

After almost 700 years, there are still nuggets of Dante's factual meaning awaiting discovery in The Divine Comedy, and to my great surprise I found fifty! They are exciting for Dante buffs, and they are also understandable and interesting for people who have never read The Divine Comedy. Audacious as this new essay is, it has been read and warmly approved by authorities Barbara Reynolds and Richard Wilbur. I consider this new essay the most surprising, exciting, and unlikely set of discoveries I've ever made.

Table of Contents

Simple Pleasures


1. Who Is This Man?
2. C. S. Lewis and Peter Rabbit
3. Unexpected Treasure
4. The Splendid Lands
5. Where is the Ancient City of Tashbaan?
6. C. S. Lewis and Christmas
7. All or Nothing: A Newly Discovered Lewis Essay


Hidden Connections


8. C. S. Lewis's Anti-anti-Semitism in The Great Divorce
9. C. S. Lewis and Dante's Paradise
10. Spring in Purgatory: Dante, Botticelli, C. S. Lewis, and a Lost Masterpiece
11. St. Anne's and St. Anne's: C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Rose Macaulay
12. Links in a Golden Chain: C. S. Lewis, George Macdonald, and Sadhu Sundar Singh
13. The Woolworth Connection: Sinclair Lewis, C. S. Lewis, and John Updike (View illustrations of the Woolworth building, with a preview of the essay)
14. Plan for the Curing: George MacDonald and Modern Child-Training Methods
15. Carved in Stone: What the Bird Did Not Say Early in the Year
16. Roots and Fruits of the Secret Garden: George MacDonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Willa Cather, and D. H. Lawrence
17. The Salty and the Sweet: Mark Twain, George MacDonald, and C. S. Lewis
18. Ungit and Orual: Facts, Mysteries, and Epiphanies


Sage Observations


19. C. S. Lewis and the Holy Spirit
20. Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: C. S. Lewis's Search for Joy
21. C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law
22. C. S. Lewis's Free Advice to Hopeful Writers
23. Mining Dante: Divine Comedy Discoveries for Everyone