The Narnia books also diverge from the pattern set by one of C

Nesbit’s characters do not get much help from adults; instead they learn to rely on their own intelligence and courage, and it is often the girls rather than the boys who confront dangers and solve problems

S. Lewis’s favorite juvenile authors, E. Nesbit, from whom he borrowed a good deal. In Nesbit’s The Five Children trilogy the https://www.hookupdate.net/escort-index/gilbert/ heroes are four temporarily parentless siblings, two of each gender (the fifth child is a year-old baby who only complicates the action). Like Lewis’s characters, they travel in time and space and meet fabulous creatures. The book some consider Nesbit’s masterpiece, The Enchanted Castle, also has four child protagonists, and a plot in which figures from prehistory and Greek mythology appear. But where Lewis was an old-fashioned Tory, Nesbit was a Fabian socialist and a feminist. Her children have little interest in religion: the clergymen in her books are kind but clueless, and the temporal and spiritual authorities the children meet on their travels are often cruel and dishonest.

Some contemporary criticism of C.S. Lewis, though justified, may be partly excused on the grounds that he was subject to the beliefs and prejudices of his time and place. His dislike and suspicion of Oriental countries, and his preference for all things Northern and for heroes who are fair and fair-haired, were typical of conservative writers of his generation. As a conventionally educated man born in 1898, and living most of his life in the then almost completely masculine environment of Oxford, he might have easily assumed that girls were weaker, less interesting, and more fearful than boys. This might also explain his distaste for what at the time was seen as typically feminine-and, to judge by what happens at the end of the series, a dislike of typical adult women.

It has been suggested that some of the problems in the Narnia books arose because Lewis himself did not take them as seriously as his works for adults like The Allegory of Love and Mere Christianity

Many readers have been infuriated by Lewis’s final condemnation of Susan Pevensie, the former wise and gentle Queen Susan, as “no longer a friend of Narnia.” In The Last Battle she is cast out of Paradise forever because at twenty-one she speaks of her earlier experiences as only a childhood fantasy, and is “too keen on being grown up” and “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Apart from the fact that these seem very minor sins, it is hard to believe that Susan could have changed that much and forgotten her happiness in Narnia and her commitment to Aslan.