I’m sure that some of the Lewisphiles on the SDMB will be able to answer this.
I know that CS Lewis’ wife Joy had a son from her first marriage - or, at least, that’s what I recall from the film Shadowlands. Has that son had any children of his own?
Background to this question: I was at a BBQ at my sister’s place not long ago. Several of her neighbours were also there. At one stage we started talking about the new Narnia film and one of the neighbours said that he was CS Lewis’ step-grandson. Are there any step-grandsons knocking about?
C.S. Lewis’ wife had TWO sons. They were David and Douglas Gresham to whom he dedicated “The Horse and His Boy.” (Book 5 in the chronicles of Narnia based on the original publishing order) Can’t help you on whether or not they had any chlidren, just wanted to correct this point.
Shadowlands was a profound movie for me. Not sure how accurate it is about Lewis’ life. From the one biography I’ve seen on Lewis, it seems like it overly romanticized their relationship.
I am a personal friend of one of CS Lewis’s step-grandsons. Was this in Lane Cove perhaps?
Douglas Gresham moved to Tasmania, where he brought up 6-7 children, before returning to UK/Ireland. Those children mostly remained in Australia and some moved to Sydney.
Douglas Gresham, the younger of Joy’s sons, is the better-known one since he is the “keeper of the Narnia flame”, as it were (he’s co-producer of the new LWW film). According to a brief online biography, he’s been a
also:
So, there’s definitely an Australian connection, and it doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that a child of a marriage that started in 1967 would be hanging around Sydney in 2005. How old was this guy, Cunctator?
Douglas’s older brother, David, lives in India, and they’re estranged.
[On preview, Sevastopol has more personal info than me, but I’ve given links! ]
Thanks to both **Sevastopol ** and **Antonius Block ** for those informative answers. I must say that I was inclined to be sceptical when the bloke said he was CS Lewis’ step-grandson. It seemed so unlikely that such a person would have found his way to Australia. I’d never heard the bit about Douglas Gresham’s move to Tasmania.
No, not in Lane Cove. It was in Mittagong, in the Southern Highlands. However, now that I think about it, I’m not absolutely certain that the bloke (whose name I simply cannot remember) *was * a neighbour of my sister. He may just have been visiting one of my sister’s neighbours.
He looked to be in about his early thirties to me.
David Gresham also has children. He married later in life than Douglas, so they are younger than Douglas’s children. Shadowlands is inaccurate in a number of ways about Lewis’s and Davidman’s lives. Whether this is important and whether it affects how good the movie is is another question, and it would require a separate thread to resolve that issue. There are a number of biographies of Lewis and one of Davidman. I personally recommend Jack by George Sayer if you want to read a biography of Lewis.
Hmm… interesting. Was there a version that numbered them in the order that I have laid out? Or am I just going crazy?? Or did my family just decide that that was the proper order for no real reason??
I remember it very distinctly… from the silver chair all the way BACK in time to ‘magician’s nephew’ and the very beginning of narnia, then partway forward to the slightly different tale of HahB, and then off to TLB where we meet up with Eustace and Jill again.
Every time that people have been arguing ‘magician’s nephew first’ or “LWW first” orders for narnian books, I thought that this was the proper LWW-first order. Huh.
Slight update. I asked my mom what she thought the order of publication was, and she wasn’t too clear about which came first out of HhB and MN. I suspect my parents might have deliberately swapped just those two into chronological order, while keeping the rest of the series in publishing order.
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