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On April 27, 1939 Oxford published a series of articles co-authored by C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard called The Personal Heresy. In the articles the two scholars traded opinions back and forth about the source of imaginative writing, whether a writer has internal inspiration that subjectively reflects his own personality, or if the source is more external and objective. Unsurprisingly, given the amount of allegory in his fantasy novels, Lewis took the latter position of imaginative writing being an objective practice. This illustration, done as a gift for a patron, features Lewis snoozing comfortably in a library chair surrounded by his characters of external influence (left to right): Mr. Tumnus, Aslan the Lion, Prince Caspian, Susan Pevensie, Dr. Weston, Jadis the White Witch, and Wormwood the Junior Tempter. The quote above is from Lewis’s On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

Description
On April 27, 1939 Oxford published a series of articles co-authored by C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard called The Personal Heresy. In the articles the two scholars traded opinions back and forth about the source of imaginative writing, whether a writer has internal inspiration that subjectively reflects his own personality, or if the source is more external and objective. Unsurprisingly, given the amount of allegory in his fantasy novels, Lewis took the latter position of imaginative writing being an objective practice. This illustration, done as a gift for a patron, features Lewis snoozing comfortably in a library chair surrounded by his characters of external influence (left to right): Mr. Tumnus, Aslan the Lion, Prince Caspian, Susan Pevensie, Dr. Weston, Jadis the White Witch, and Wormwood the Junior Tempter. The quote above is from Lewis’s On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”