The Work
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life was published in 1955 by Geoffrey Bles (London). It is an autobiography of approximately 240 pages that covers Lewis's life from his childhood in Belfast through his conversion to Christianity at the age of thirty-two or thirty-three, with a chapter at the end briefly describing his final acceptance of the Christian faith in 1931. The title is taken from Wordsworth's sonnet 'Surprised by joy - impatient as the Wind,' though Lewis gives the phrase an entirely different referent from Wordsworth's grief at his daughter's death.
The book was written partly in response to a request from an American reader who wanted to know more about Lewis's intellectual and spiritual development. Lewis regarded it as an account of a very particular kind of religious experience - the experience he called 'Joy' (Sehnsucht) - rather than a comprehensive autobiography, and he was notably reticent about personal details he considered irrelevant to this theme. The book omits, for example, any mention of Mrs. Janie Moore, the mother of a fellow soldier who had died and whom Lewis had cared for as a quasi-adopted mother for thirty years.
Biblical Engagement
Psalm 42:1 ('As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God') is Lewis's single most important scriptural touchstone in the book. The experience he calls 'Joy' - an intense, stabbing longing for an indefinable beauty that cannot be satisfied by any earthly object - is identified as the creature's unconscious longing for the Creator. The deer panting for water is the perfect image: a physical thirst pointing toward a spiritual thirst.
Matthew 13:45-46 ('Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it') provides the narrative shape of Lewis's conversion account: the entire spiritual autobiography is organized as the progressive realization that the pearl he had been seeking - in Norse mythology, in romantic poetry, in idealist philosophy - was always the kingdom of heaven, not any temporal beauty or intellectual system.
John 15:11 ('These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full') provides the Johannine context for Lewis's central claim: that the joy he had been experiencing as a longing was in fact a participation in the divine life, an anticipation of the fullness that Christ promises. The difference between Joy-as-longing and Joy-as-fulfillment becomes for Lewis the difference between life before and after conversion.
Philippians 4:4 ('Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice') is the Pauline counterpart: Lewis's theological point is that what Paul calls joy is not simply a pleasant emotion but a disposition of the whole person toward its proper end - God himself. The longing that previously made Lewis miserable becomes, once named and directed, the foundation of a genuine and settled happiness.
Author and Context
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) wrote Surprised by Joy at the height of his fame, three years after the publication of the complete Chronicles of Narnia and more than a decade after Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters had made him the most widely read Christian apologist in the English-speaking world. By 1955 Lewis was also teaching at Cambridge (having left Oxford for the newly created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English), and the book has something of the quality of a summing-up - a retrospective account of the intellectual journey that had led him to the place where he now stood.
The book's specific occasion was the death of his father, Albert Lewis, in 1929 - the same year as his conversion to theism - which had released Lewis from a difficult family obligation and freed him to reflect more openly on his own spiritual development. The book also appeared four years before his marriage to Joy Davidman in 1956, whose first name is either a remarkable coincidence or a providential joke that Lewis himself noted.
Themes
The book's organizing theme is the distinction between the experience of Joy (with a capital J) and every misidentification of it. Lewis traces his pursuit of Joy through Norse mythology (especially Longfellow's translation of Tegner's Drapa and the prose Eddas), through Romantic poetry (especially Wordsworth and Keats), through Idealist philosophy (especially the work of Samuel Alexander and the philosophy of 'Spirit'), and through a prolonged period of Romanticism and then disillusionment.
The argument is that every experience of Joy points beyond itself - that the moment one tries to grasp it, it evaporates, because it is not a state to be attained but a longing whose object lies outside the self. This makes Joy, paradoxically, the most reliable pointer toward God: precisely because it cannot be satisfied by anything earthly, it testifies to an object that is not earthly.
The book's extended account of Lewis's intellectual journey through Idealism, pantheism, and finally Christianity is one of the most rigorous accounts in twentieth-century literature of how an honest mind might move from atheism to faith. Lewis does not present his conversion as an emotional experience but as an intellectual capitulation - a recognition that his own philosophical arguments had left him no coherent alternative.
Reception
The book was well received and added a philosophical and autobiographical dimension to Lewis's apologetic reputation. Some readers found it more interesting than the explicitly apologetic works because it showed the interior of the conversion process rather than arguing for its conclusions. The book's account of Lewis's schooling - including the brutal Wynyward House (called 'Belsen' in the book) and his years with the private tutor W.T. Kirkpatrick - has been widely influential on subsequent accounts of Lewis's intellectual formation.
Legacy
Surprised by Joy gave evangelical readers a philosophical vocabulary for discussing spiritual longing that had not previously been available in popular Christian writing. The concept of Sehnsucht as a pointer toward God has been taken up by countless subsequent Christian apologists and spiritual directors. The book has directly influenced Peter Kreeft's apologetic writing, John Piper's theology of Christian Hedonism, and the spiritual direction tradition associated with the Spiritual Exercises. It remains one of the most widely assigned texts in college courses on Christian thought and conversion narrative.