Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold was published by Geoffrey Bles in September 1956 and is Lewis’s last novel, his most psychologically complex work, and the one he considered his best — though it was a commercial disappointment on publication and remains the least read of his major books. It retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, but from the perspective of Orual, Psyche’s older sister — a woman who is physically ugly, intellectually brilliant, and emotionally possessive, and whose love for Psyche is revealed, over the course of the novel, to be a form of devouring selfishness.
The Novel
Orual, now Queen of Glome (a barbarous kingdom neighboring Greece), writes her account as an accusation against the gods: they took Psyche from her, they refused to show themselves clearly, and they demanded faith without evidence. The first part of the novel presents Orual’s case with devastating persuasiveness — she seems reasonable, devoted, wronged.
The second part is Orual’s undoing. She discovers, through a series of visions and confrontations, that her love for Psyche was possessive and destructive; that she consumed everyone around her (her sister Redival, her Greek tutor the Fox, her faithful soldier Bardia) in the name of love; and that her complaint against the gods is the complaint of someone who has never truly loved anyone but herself.
The final revelation — “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” — is Lewis’s most profound statement about the relationship between self-knowledge and divine encounter.
Collecting Till We Have Faces
First edition (Geoffrey Bles, London, 1956): Red cloth with gilt lettering. Dust jacket.
Market values (with dust jacket):
- Fine in dust jacket: $2,000–$6,000
- Very good in dust jacket: $800–$2,000
- Without dust jacket: $200–$500
First American edition (Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1957): $800–$2,000 in dust jacket.
The book’s growing critical reputation — it is increasingly regarded as Lewis’s masterpiece — and its relative scarcity (it sold poorly on first publication) make first editions a strong investment.