Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life was published by Geoffrey Bles in September 1955 and is Lewis’s intellectual autobiography — the story of his conversion from atheism to Christianity, told with characteristic lucidity and self-awareness. The title is borrowed from a Wordsworth sonnet, and the “Joy” of the title is not happiness but a specific experience: an intense, momentary longing — a stab of desire for something beyond the world — that Lewis first experienced as a child and that he identifies as the thread leading him, over decades, toward God.
The Book
Lewis traces his life from childhood in Belfast (the death of his mother when he was nine, the misery of English boarding schools, the discovery of Norse mythology and Romantic literature), through his adolescence as a convinced atheist and materialist, through his years at Oxford as a scholar and don, to the moment of his conversion — which he describes with devastating anti-climax:
“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
The conversion is presented not as a triumph but as a surrender — the capitulation of a man who had run out of intellectual defenses against a truth he did not want.
Collecting Surprised by Joy
First edition (Geoffrey Bles, London, 1955): Green cloth with gilt lettering. Dust jacket.
Market values (with dust jacket):
- Fine in dust jacket: $1,500–$4,000
- Very good in dust jacket: $500–$1,500
- Without dust jacket: $100–$300
First American edition (Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1956): $500–$1,500 in dust jacket.
The book’s enduring appeal to both literary and religious readers sustains strong collector demand.