Everything on this page is written by UECF.NET as background for readers new to the book. It is our own introductory material, drawn from widely available biographical facts about C. S. Lewis, and it is not a quotation or paraphrase of any passage from The Great Divorce. The printed book remains the place to hear Lewis in his own words.
Who was C. S. Lewis?
Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was born in Belfast and spent most of his academic career teaching English literature at Oxford and, later, Cambridge University. Raised in a churchgoing home, he became an atheist in his teenage years, a position he held into early adulthood. Through philosophical reading and long conversations with Oxford friends — including J. R. R. Tolkien, later the author of The Lord of the Rings — Lewis moved first to belief in a general God and then, in 1931, to Christian faith.
From the mid-1930s on, Lewis became one of the century’s most widely read Christian writers, producing scholarly literary criticism alongside popular theology, fiction, and children’s literature. He is best known today for the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia and for Mere Christianity, adapted from wartime BBC radio talks. He was a founding member of the Inklings, an Oxford circle of friends who met to read and critique one another’s writing, and he married the American writer Joy Davidman in 1956; her death from cancer in 1960 later shaped his short book A Grief Observed. Lewis died on 22 November 1963, at his home in Oxford.
Where The Great Divorce fits in his work
The Great Divorce was written during the Second World War, not long after the wartime BBC talks that would become Mere Christianity and around the same period as The Screwtape Letters. It first appeared, under the title “Who Goes Home?”, as a serial in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian during 1944 and 1945, before Lewis revised it into the single volume published by Geoffrey Bles later in 1945. UECF.NET’s note: unlike the direct, expository style of Mere Christianity, this book works entirely through story and image — closer in method to Lewis’s science-fiction novels or the later Narnia books than to his straightforward apologetics.
The book is also a direct, acknowledged tribute to George MacDonald (1824–1905), the Scottish minister and fantasy writer whom Lewis credited, in his own later writing, with having “baptized” his imagination as a young reader years before his conversion to Christianity. Lewis makes MacDonald the narrator’s guide through the story’s Heaven-adjacent country, in a role modeled on the poet Virgil’s guidance of Dante in the Divine Comedy — one writer publicly repaying a debt to another who shaped him.
What the book covers
Across a Preface and fourteen chapters, Lewis follows a busload of ghosts from a grey, joyless town on an excursion to the outskirts of Heaven, where solid, radiant Spirits invite each of them to stay and become real. Almost every ghost ultimately turns back, choosing some familiar grievance, vanity, resentment, or possessive love over the unfamiliar joy on offer, while the narrator's guide, George MacDonald, explains why such a choice, freely and repeatedly made, is what Hell finally is. UECF.NET’s chapter-by-chapter study guides, linked from the contents page, summarize and discuss each of these encounters in our own words.