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.

Agreed that he's morally accountable for his views, but I consider it to his credit that his views improved with time and experience rather than stagnating or worsening.

Everybody gets points for growing wiser.

It's just that, for me, there's a difference between saying "Come on, that's juvenilia, he didn't write his first great novel until he was thirty" and saying "Well, he did say this incredibly stupid and narrow-minded thing, but he wised up about a year before he died."

Although I adore Yeats, who was a complete -stick-a-banana-up-your-nose-and-claim-you're-an-elephant loony, and who never copped to it until he wrote The Circus Animals' Desertion.

Not about a year before he died, but progressively, from the time he met the woman who would eventually become his wife (early 50s, if memory serves). He never dealt completely honestly with his change in perspective -- just completely stopped writing about The Woman Problem altogether in his theology/lit/life in general essays. My personal hope is that he realized he'd been an ass but lacked the courage to publicly recant, but there's no way to prove that.

He does get points from me, though, for having spent the last decade plus of his life refraining from the bloviating that has gotten him in trouble here, all the while creating female characters in his fiction who were progressively more rich, sympathetic, complicated and fully human.