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.

Now that I think about it, just about every author I adore from that generation--Lewis, Sayers, Tolkien, etc.--has at least one issue and/or authorial tic that makes me roll my eyes when I encounter it. I guess it's an individual comfort zone thing. F'rinstance, I get more annoyed with Tolkien than Lewis over gender issues, because the women and girls in the Narnia stories are a heck of a lot more well-rounded and important to the story than the ones of Middle-Earth. Not that that's stopping me from awaiting The Two Towers film with bated breath; it just annoys me a little.

Truly, the past is a different country.