Record Number: 32361

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Reading Experience:

Evidence:

'I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle — our very own set: never since I first read "The well at the world's end" have I enjoyed a book so much — and indeed I think my new "find" is quite as good as Malory or Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George Macdonald's "Faerie Romance", Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired everyman copy — by the way isn't it funny, they cost 1/1d. now — on our station bookstall last Saturday.... you simply MUST get this at once.... of course it is quite hopeless for me to try to describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along that little stream to the faery wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree and how the shadow of his gnarled, knotted hand falls upon the book the hero is reading... I know that you will quite agree with me.... There are one or two poems in the tale — as in the Morris tales you know — which, with one or two exceptions, are shockingly bad, so don't TRY to appreciate them: it is just a sign, isn't it, that some geniuses can't work in metrical forms.'

Century:

1900-1945

Date:

Between 4 Mar 1916 and 7 Mar 1916

Country:

England

Time

n/a

Place:

Great Bookham
Surrey
'Gastons'

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

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Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

Clive Staples Lewis

Age:

Child (0-17)

Gender:

Male

Date of Birth:

29 Nov 1898

Socio-Economic Group:

Professional / academic / merchant / farmer

Occupation:

Student

Religion:

Church of England

Country of Origin:

Northern Ireland

Country of Experience:

England

Listeners present if any:
e.g family, servants, friends

n/a

Additional Comments:

n/a

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Text Being Read:

Author:

George Macdonald

Title:

Phantastes, a Faerie Romance for Men and Women

Genre:

Fiction, Fantasy novel

Form of Text:

Print: Book

Publication Details

London: Dent, 1915 (Everyman's Library)

Provenance

owned

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Source Information:

Record ID:

32361

Source:

Print

Author:

C. S. Lewis

Editor:

Walter Hooper

Title:

C. S. Lewis Collected Letters

Place of Publication:

London

Date of Publication:

2000

Vol:

1

Page:

169-70

Additional Comments:

From a letter to Arthur Greeves, Tuesday 7 March 1916

Citation:

C. S. Lewis, Walter Hooper (ed.), C. S. Lewis Collected Letters, (London, 2000), 1, p. 169-70, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=32361, accessed: 02 May 2024

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Additional Comments:

This was the most important reading experience of Lewis's life. Writing forty years later he describes it thus: 'I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness.... But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow. That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptised; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.' (Surprised by Joy, Ch. 11, final paragraph.)