the lion the witch and the wardrobe by cs lewis

She was 4 years old when he started the book and 14 when he finished it. Lucy is based on Lucy Barfield, Lewis’s goddaughter, and the daughter of Owen Barfield. He said in a letter, “It was, by the unanimous verdict of my friends, so bad that I destroyed it.” 7. The reaction of his friends to the story was discouraging, to say the least. Lewis destroyed the first version of the book because his friends didn’t like it.īefore 1947, Lewis wrote a draft of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with four children named Ann, Martin, Rose, and Peter. Others started to join them, and soon the group swelled to 19 men, so they started meeting on Thursday evenings to share and discuss their work. While both writers were working on fantasy novels-Lewis on Narnia and Tolkien on The Lord of the Rings-they met every Monday morning to talk about writing.

Tolkien were in a writing group called The Inklings. Incidentally, Aslan means 'lion' in Turkish. Lewis wasn’t sure what to do with the book until “Aslan came bounding into it.” He’d been having dreams of lions, and found that putting Aslan in “pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him.” Lewis's son, Douglas Gresham, beside a sculpture of Aslan in Belfast's 'CS Lewis Square.' / Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

The story was floundering until Lewis invented Aslan the lion.Ĭ.S. Lewis started in 1939 and finished in 1949. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe took 10 years to write. This situation seems to be the inspiration for the four children-Susan, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy-being sent to live with the old Professor in the book. In 1939, three girls, Margaret, Mary, and Katherine, were evacuated from London because of anticipated bombings and sent to live with Lewis in the countryside for a short time. The book was also inspired by three girls who lived with Lewis during World War II. The story was inspired by an image of a faun.įrom age 16 onward, Lewis often found himself imagining “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.” According to his short essay It All Began With A Picture, the image continued to come to him until, at age 40, he said to himself, “Let's try to make a story about it.” 2. Here are some things you may not know about this long-lived children’s classic. Little did he know that his novel would become a best seller, lead to six sequels, and still be widely read decades later.

Lewis struggled and fought to complete The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In the 1940s, Oxford University professor C.S.

The lion the witch and the wardrobe by cs lewis