C. S. Lewis might well have considered the present book heretical. This is not because it is theologically suspect, but because, in one of his earlier books, The Personal Heresy, written with E. M. W. Tillyard, Lewis attacked the assumption that poetry (and by implication other kinds of imaginative writing) is primarily an expression of the inner life of the writer. In a move which anticipated by some years the famous essay by Wimsatt and Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946), and even in some respects Roland Barthes's ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), Lewis denied that the reading of literature is in the first place a matter of ‘knowing or getting into touch with’, a writer (PH 9, emphasis in original). Rather, he maintained, ‘when we read poetry as poetry should be read, we have before us no representation which claims to be the poet, and frequently no representation of a man, a character, or a personality at all ’ (PH 4, emphasis in original). Echoing T. S. Eliot's theory of ‘impersonality’ in literature (though Lewis had to be reminded by Tillyard of his unacknowledged closeness to Eliot on this point, cf. PH 31–2), Lewis saw ‘poetless poetry’ not as an accident of history but rather as an ideal to be aspired to (PH 18 ff.). Acutely aware of the split between the self that produces a text and the self that appears in the text, Lewis prescribed the suppression of the former as a matter of spiritual hygiene: ‘The character whom I describe as myself leaves out … this present act of description – which is an element in my real history; and that is the beginning of a rift which will grow wider at every step we take from the vulgarity of confession to the disinfected and severer world of lyric poetry’ (PH 10).

This need on Lewis's part to efface the writer in ‘real history’ has, as we shall see, deep psychological as well as theological roots. It contrasts sharply with the proliferation of Lewis hagiography – the ‘Lewis industry’ which Kathryn Lindskoog savages in her book The C. S. Lewis Hoax. Neither approach – author elimination or author worship – augurs well for a book in the ‘Writers and their Work’ series.