CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898-1963) & JOY LEWIS (d. 1960)

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CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898-1963) & JOY LEWIS (d. 1960)
A collection of unpublished correspondence from Lewis and his wife, Joy, comprising 8 autograph letters, signed, by Lewis, altogether 9 pages, and 10 autograph letters, and one typed letter, signed, by Joy Lewis, altogether 25 pages, from The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford, September 13th 1957 to 21st March 1961, all to the author Jane Gaskell (b. 1941).

The Lewis's counsel the young writer in her craft, as well as giving practical advice on the choice of literary agent and publisher, and the best way to get a book published. The first one-page autograph letter from Lewis, dated September 13th 1957, is evidently a response to a letter from Jane concerning her book Strange Evil published by Hutchinson earlier that year: "Sorry, but the question is not whether if your fairies really existed, they might possibly buy their underclothes in London. The question is whether by putting in that detail you are tending to maintain or to shatter the atmosphere you want the reader to get ... One selects what is either logically or emotionally necessary." This letter is followed by a five-page autograph letter from Joy, dated Sept 16th, stating: "I'd like to add something to my husband's comments on your book, which I read with a good deal of pleasure ... The weaknesses in your writing are not a matter of probability or possibility but of what I like to call congruity -- harmony, that is. Thus it is not improbable that backward inhabitants of another world might buy London nighties. But it is in the highest degree incongruous."

The correspondence continues on these lines until Jane sends them her next book King's Daughter. In a two-page typed letter of 6th August 1958, Joy tells her: "We agreed quite thoroughly in our judgement ... a great weakness of the book is its monotonous repetition of fairly similar adventures with a new group of characters ... All these are technical weaknesses which you can soon correct. There is, however, a deeper trouble, and I think you are now old enough to be talked to frankly about it. I mean your attitude to sex ... The question of whether or not a girl loses her virginity may, in the real world, sometimes be very important to her ... But even in the real world it seldom matters very much to anyone else." The content of the letters remains similar until Lewis informs Jane in a one-page letter, 24th June 1960, that: "Joy has had to go back to the Nursing Home after a terrible night ... what we had hoped was only gastric flu was diagnosed as cancer of the liver. Everyone, including herself, tells me this is the end ... If you pray (I don't know your 'views') pray for us." One of the last letters in the correspondence is a one-page letter of 4 lines, from Lewis, 26th August 1960, stating: "I know how sorry you will be to hear that Joy died on July 13th, go on praying for us both. She loved you very much." (28)

Provenance

Jane Gaskell.

Lot Essay

C.S. Lewis first wrote to Jane Gaskell in 1957 after Hutchinson had published her first novel Strange Evil. This initial letter is now in the Bodleian Library, but a photocopy is included with the above correspondence. In it Lewis states of her book: "I want to tell you that I think it a quite amazing achievement -- incomparably beyond anything I would have done at that age."

Jane Gaskell wrote Strange Evil and King's Daughter, both published by Hutchinson, almost simultaneously and, as the publisher's preface to her second novel explains, submitted both for publication at the same time in "eight little blue exercise books." A hidden compliment is paid to C.S and Joy Lewis in this preface which states that the author "has in fact, in revising this book, derived much benefit from the wealth of advice and criticism the publication of Stange Evil has brought her."

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