A letter from CS Lewis discovered inside a secondhand book sees the author writing about how real joy feels.
Believed to be previously unpublished, the letter to a Mrs Ellis was written by Lewis on 19 August 1945, and sees the author explaining his concept of joy. Three years later, Lewis would expand on the subject in his memoir Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, the account of his conversion to Christianity.
Before he began work on the memoir, however, Lewis tells Ellis in this letter that “real joy … jumps under ones ribs and tickles down one’s back and makes one forget meals and keeps one (delightedly) sleepless o’ nights”
The handwritten letter had been enclosed within a copy of A Problem of Painbought from a secondhand bookshop, and is set to be auctioned later this month. “A private owner bought the book some years ago, and some time later discovered the letter inside it. As far as we know it’s unpublished,” said Chris Albury of Dominic Winter Auctioneers. “We haven’t been able to discover who Mrs Ellis is – there’s no envelope, because the owner just found it in the book.”
The letter will be auctioned on 18 December, with a guide price of £1,200 to £1,500. “We’ve only had a handful of good CS Lewis letters before and they’ve all attracted strong interest,” said Albury. “CS Lewis letters don’t come up very often.”
Source: The Guardian
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