It wasn’t supposed to be this way for Jane, though: “She had always intended to continue her own career as a scholar after she was married: that was one of the reasons why they were to have no children, at any rate for a long time yet.” This part, at least, is not entirely unlike my own evolution from first reading THS to reading today, from PhD applicant to full-time mama. The reader soon learns that “marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement.” The fate was practically mandated in the 1940s, when Lewis was writing, but is not unlike bleak, isolated moments of modern motherhood. The first sentence reads, “’Matrimony was ordained, thirdly’, said Jane Studdock to herself, ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.'” Then follows a plodding description of the emptiness of her existence as a housewife, concluding bleakly, “The sun shone and the clock ticked.” It’s a strange opening for a book that will encompass disembodied, sentient heads, Merlin, and more. There are drinks at pubs, and jargon at the office, and later, a lot of kind of gross-out violence.

Lewis is not someone who writes very often of women, having led an unusually male-centric bachelor life, and this book is, for the most part, fittingly male-centric. But it was far from my favorite of Lewis’s works, even though it’s one of J’s favorite books ever. My time in Oxford only confirmed for me the rightness of both decisions: I loved traveling England with J and I loved the long mornings spent writing about Bleak House or the impact of the British school story on Harry Potter. When I read That Hideous Strength beside The Place of the Lionand saw the influence his friend Charles Williams had on Lewis’s writing, it sort of made more sense. I was engaged (J was studying abroad nearby in London), and I was starting to think about applying to doctoral programs for English literature. I gave it another chance at 21 while studying abroad in Oxford. The conclusion of his Space Trilogy, THS is very different in tone and style from the first two books, and I didn’t much like it. I think I first read That Hideous Strengthwhen I was 18 or 19 and systematically making my way through C.S.

That hideous strength book