A. N. Wilson’s life of C. S. Lewis comes only a year or so after George B. Sayer’s Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times.¹ It is at least the fourth substantial biography of Lewis to have appeared in recent years. It does not add a great deal of “hard” information, though there are some valuable memories collected from conversations Wilson has had with friends and acquaintances of Lewis and a vividly independent reappraisal of the known facts. Perhaps it should be called a biographical portrait rather than a full-scale biography. It is adequately documented, but you would not go to it as to a reference book. Indeed, none of the existing biographies is exactly that, and Wilson’s is much the most freshly written of them all.

It is structured on a simplified Freudian model, unpretentious and sensitively handled, which attaches great importance to Lewis’s early loss of his mother and to his complex and difficult relations with his father after the mother’s death. The mysterious relationship with Mrs. Moore, the mother of a friend killed in the First World War, with whom Lewis lived until the end of her life, falls naturally within this scheme—as does his marriage, late in his own life, to a woman who, like his mother when he last knew her, was the mother of two small boys and dying of cancer. Wilson believes that Mrs. Moore was Lewis’s lover, while there is an opposite view, chiefly identified with Walter Hooper,