Staying at CS Lewis's home

The Kilns, March 2025

I can quote C.S. Lewis nearly as well as I can quote Flannery O’Connor. The twentieth-century Protestant saint has influenced my imagination enormously, less so the Narnia Chronicles and more so from Experiment in Criticism, Surprised by Joy, his sci-fi trilogy, and Till We Have Faces. Perhaps those are not the usual books that dominate when people think of Lewis—they likely have read Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters, which made him popular in America. Staying in his home at the Kilns, outside of Oxford over spring break, I heard a visitor from Japan ask the tour guide why all these Midwestern Americans were there to see the home of a Chaucer scholar! The highlights of my Lewis bookshelf appear less strange in light of this man, who was only familiar with The Allegory of Love.