Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Summary

Surprised by Joy is C. S. Lewis's account of his life from early childhood to his acceptance of Christianity in 1931. Lewis says in his preface that the book is not a full autobiography but the story of his conversion, and that it follows one thread: his experience of what he calls Joy, a sudden, piercing longing for something unnamed that is itself more desirable than any ordinary satisfaction. In fifteen chapters he begins in Belfast, with a book-filled house called Little Lea, rainy days, an older brother Warren who became his closest companion, and three early stabs of Joy: a toy garden his brother made in a biscuit-tin lid, Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin with its sense of autumn, and lines from Longfellow announcing the death of Balder. His mother's death from cancer in 1908 ends the security of his childhood, and he is sent to a school in Hertfordshire run by a brutal headmaster he calls Oldie, which he names Belsen. At a preparatory school in Malvern, which he calls Chartres, he loses his childhood faith, partly under the influence of a kindly matron interested in the occult. A glimpse of Arthur Rackham's illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods awakens a love of what he calls Northernness, which he shares with his Belfast friend Arthur Greeves. He describes Malvern College, called Wyvern, with its system of senior boys, or Bloods, and junior servants, with unusual frankness. Rescued by his father, he studies with the retired headmaster W. T. Kirkpatrick, the Great Knock, at Great Bookham in Surrey, who teaches him to argue rigorously and to read Homer in Greek, while he remains a confident atheist; there he buys George MacDonald's Phantastes at a railway station and later says it baptized his imagination. He goes up to Oxford in 1917, serves in the trenches of France with the Somerset Light Infantry, falls ill with trench fever and is wounded in April 1918. Back at Oxford, friendships with Owen Barfield and others, the reading of Chesterton and the force of his own philosophical reasoning steadily close off his escape routes. In the Trinity Term of 1929, in his rooms at Magdalen, he admits that God is God and prays; about two years later, on a ride to Whipsnade Zoo, he finds that he believes Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Joy, he concludes, was a signpost, not the destination. The book was published in London by Geoffrey Bles in 1955 and in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1956.

Top Lessons

• Longing as a signpost

  Lewis's Joy is a desire that no earthly object satisfies: the toy garden, Squirrel Nutkin's autumn, the Norse North. He spent years mistaking the feeling itself, or its images, for what it pointed to. His conclusion is that such longing is a signpost toward God, valuable for where it directs us rather than in itself.

• Honest thinking leads somewhere

  Kirkpatrick taught Lewis to test every claim by reason, and Lewis remained an atheist under him. Yet the same habit of honest argument, applied to his own beliefs at Oxford, gradually removed his objections to God. The book shows that faithful reasoning and faith need not be enemies.

• Grief and the loss of a child's world

  Lewis writes that with his mother's death all settled happiness disappeared from his life. He describes the brothers drawing closer as their father struggled in grief. The memoir treats early sorrow plainly and shows how it shaped a whole life.

• The surrender of the will

  Lewis presents his conversion not as a search that succeeded but as a pursuit in which God closed in on a reluctant man. He describes kneeling in 1929 as giving in, not as triumph. Humility, in his account, comes before understanding.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The memoir touches medicine at a few points. Lewis describes his mother's illness and death from cancer in 1908, the household's grief, and his own unanswered child's prayer for her recovery. He records trench fever early in 1918, which sent him to hospital at Le Tréport where he read Chesterton, and a shrapnel wound in April 1918 at Mount Bernenchon, which he says was caused by an English shell bursting behind him. He treats the horrors of the front in a few restrained paragraphs and says he has put the war aside in memory; any reading of this as a trauma response is interpretive. His portrait of the headmaster Oldie, whose school closed and who was later judged insane, belongs to the history of how mental illness was recognized in schoolmasters of the period.

• Chapter I

  His mother's cancer, the operation at home, her death, and the change in the family.

• Chapter XII

  Trench fever and hospital at Le Tréport, and the wound received at Mount Bernenchon in April 1918.

• Chapter XII

  Lewis's brief, deliberately restrained memories of the front and his statement that the war is cut off from the rest of his experience.