Surprised by Joy

Lewis's autobiography of his early life, published by Geoffrey Bles in London in 1955. It is less a full memoir than the history of a longing he calls Joy, a stab of desire for something beyond the world, which he first knew as a child and pursued through myth, literature and philosophy. He tells of his childhood in Belfast with his brother Warren, the death of his mother in 1908, unhappy years at English schools, his tutoring by W. T. Kirkpatrick, his war service, and his friendships at Oxford with Owen Barfield and J. R. R. Tolkien. The book reaches its climax in his acceptance of theism in 1929, when he describes himself as perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England, and ends with his belief in Christ in 1931. It is the indispensable source for Lewis's inner life before his conversion, though some later biographers have revised its chronology.