That Hideous Strength made me furious, and if there's an afterlife, I'm going to hunt Lewis down and Have Words with him about it. Though, IIRC, it's of his earlier works, from before he met his wife, so it's entirely possible she did it for me during his lifetime. But I've never had the issues with The Last Battle that it seems everyone else does. But I probably read him a little differently because I come out of a fundamentalist background--to me everything he wrote with the exception of THS is a breath of fresh air. And, if it weren't for him, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have any faith left at all. Maybe some would say that'd be no great loss, but I really want to believe if there's any way I possibly can, so I'm grateful to Lewis's works for showing me there's a way to be a Christian that allows me to think and question and use my imagination.

I liked The Last Battle as well-- primarily because of the expansive expression of the Kingdom of God but also because when I die I get to go to Narnia.

when I die I get to go to Narnia.

Not so fast, missy. See above re Susan.

It wasn't just that Susan was a woman with sexuality -- it was that she had become "grown-up" in the worst possible way: unimaginative, relentlessly materialistic, preening, superior, and willing to cheerfully belittle the others and to deny her own past experiences because they didn't fit into what she saw as the proper grown-up world.

Although Lewis himself did not get along easily with all children, and felt none of the baby oost/worship of The Child (in the abstract, anyway) that his culture expected, he was a huge believer in the reality of a child's experiences. He passionately hated people who shrug off children's joys and woes as somehow less exalting, less painful, less expansive or less of a terrible burden, than those of adults, simply because it's children they're happening to.

He went through two major childhood traumas himself -- the death of his beloved mother at age 6 (and saddled with a nearly hysterically overemotional father who was extremely ill-equipped for solo parenting, the kind of person who makes for anecdotes that make you simultaneously weep with laughter and thank TPTB that he isn't your parent); and several years at a boarding school run by a clinically insane sadist - a place so horrible he called it "Belsen" in his autobiography. By the time he got to Belsen (meeting up with his brother, who'd been there a while, given up on his fruitless complaints, and resigned himself to staying until either he graduated or the headmaster murdered someone), he'd become conditioned to the notions that (1) all grown-ups think all children are naturally stupid, and (2) all grown-ups are totally untrustworthy.

He found some mentors later in life who showed him what it is to be a true teacher and a loving parent figure, but he never really shook his bone-deep hostility to the grown-up world of taxes and nylons and lipstick and drains and all the rest. It wasn't Susan's mature womanhood he was attacking; it was her betrayal of the truth of what she had been and of what her brothers and sister still were, her belittling and condescension and dismissal of it all.

And yup, he was a Christian Platonist, and the end of TLB is explicitly Platonic, and I'm in the "never bothered me at all, in fact I like it" camp.

t /scary windbag

Okay, now explain away "That Hideous Strength". Or the bit in "Mere Christianity" where he says "Come on, women, admit it. Aren't you really a lot less rational than men?"

Cereal:

And nope, I don't much like THS. It has some valuable stuff, but it has to be read with a lot of allowances.

A more accurate window into his fully matured view of women can be found in his last completed work, "Till We Have Faces," a retelling of the Psyche and Eros myth told from the POV of Psyche's sister.

fully matured view of women

I'm sorry, anything he wrote after age 21, he's morally accountable for. Unless you're a Mormon, in which case he was on the hook from age 7.

And again, THS and "Mere Christianity" are both earlier works. And there's so much that I find good and nourishing in MC that I generally just shrug off that (yes, offensive) section, or go back and re-read Dorothy Sayers's "Unpopular Opinions" as a tonic.

Hey, I overlook Dorothy Sayers's raging class issues and Semitic stereotyping. Let us overlook together.

Nah, I'm not saying he's not morally accountable for them, but I am saying that they don't represent the be-all and end-all of his views of women, set in stone, now and forever amen. They demonstrably don't.