In those very years the publication of the seven episodes of the Chronicles of Narnia was nearing completion. Lewis' passionate interest in the first years of human life was a natural, as it were, 'obligatory' choice. However, it concerns only his first 30 years, because, as he wrote in the preface, 'I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting'. Lewis chose for his autobiography, which he wrote at the age of 56. Surprised by Joy is perhaps one of the most beautiful titles that can be given to a book that is to tell the story of a conversion and it is this title that C.S. Young Jack's intelligence was subtle, his curiosity boundless, his acumen amazing, his dialectic power exceptional yet something came into play that shattered his seemingly firm belief in the inexistence of God, for in life there is always something else, something unforeseen, unnoticed or surprising. After what he calls a blandly Christian childhood he threw himself heart and soul into a rationalist and idealist atheism that he professed and lived. Lewis was born in 1898 into an Anglo-Irish family at Belfast.

Speaking these words is Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends simply as 'Jack', a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England' ( Surprised By Joy,ch. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. 'You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. The most dejected, reluctant convert in all England

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