The Great Divorce
C. S. Lewis · A dream-vision of a bus trip from the outskirts of Hell to the foothills of Heaven, and of the choices that keep its passengers from staying
About this book
The Great Divorce is a short work of Christian allegorical fantasy in which a busload of ghostly residents of a grey, quarrelsome town take an excursion to the outskirts of Heaven, where solid, radiant Spirits invite each of them to stay and become real. One by one, nearly every ghost turns back, choosing some smaller, familiar grievance, vanity, or resentment over the joy on offer. Lewis presents the story as a dream and a fantasy — not a claim about the actual furniture of the afterlife — written to dramatize his conviction that some choices are not compromises but forks in the road, each leading to a genuinely different place. The book explores themes of repentance, pride, grace, self-deception, and the nature of a freely chosen separation from God, without claiming to settle the theology of Heaven and Hell in detail.
Author: C. S. Lewis
First edition: 1945 (UK) · Geoffrey Bles · London · serialized in The Guardian, 1944–1945
First US edition: 1946 · Macmillan · New York
Genre: Christian allegory / theological fantasy
Bibliographic record: Internet Archive (reference only — access-restricted lending copy; not reproduced here)
- 14 chapters
- 1 preface
- 1945 first published
- English · Allegory · Heaven & Hell
How to use this study companion
This is a guide to Lewis’s book, not a copy of it. The Great Divorce remains in copyright in both the United States and the United Kingdom, so its text is not reproduced here. For the Preface and all fourteen chapters you will find an original UECF.NET summary of what happens, its main themes, key ideas, the ghosts and Spirits who appear, a public-domain King James Scripture passage chosen for that chapter’s theme, related Bible references, practical application, and questions for personal reflection and small-group discussion.
Read the chapter in the book itself — from a library, a bookseller, or the Internet Archive’s access-restricted lending copy — then use the page here to review, discuss, and apply it. Every page has Previous / Next links, the full table of contents, adjustable text size, dark mode, bookmarks, and search across the whole companion (press Ctrl K). Your reading position and bookmarks are saved in this browser only.
Why the full text isn’t here: the copy of The Great Divorce on the Internet Archive (greatdivorce00lewi) is a Collier Books paperback edition (1984) held in a controlled, print-disabled lending collection — it can be borrowed there under the Archive’s own access rules, but it is not a public-domain text and UECF.NET has no licence to republish it. The book will not enter the public domain in the United States until 2041, or in the United Kingdom until 2034. (It has separately entered the public domain in Canada, under that country’s life-plus-50 rule as it stood before a 2022 extension that did not revive already-expired copyrights — which is why some Canadian sites host the full text. UECF.NET is a US-based ministry and follows US and UK copyright law, so that Canadian status does not apply here.) See About this web edition for the full determination.
Related: UECF.NET also offers full study companions and web editions of Lewis’s Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and The Screwtape Letters.
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Contents
Preface — on the title and the fantasy that follows
The Grey Town
The Ghosts Who Turn Back
George MacDonald as Guide
Sarah Smith, and the End of the Dream
About this web book
The Great Divorce began as a series of articles Lewis wrote for the Anglican newspaper The Guardian between 1944 and 1945, under the title “Who Goes Home?” before being revised and published as a single volume in the UK by Geoffrey Bles in 1945 and in the US by Macmillan in 1946. Lewis wrote it explicitly as a fantasy answering William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and gave the narrator’s guide the name and character of George MacDonald, the nineteenth-century Scottish minister and fantasy writer Lewis credited elsewhere with having “baptized” his imagination years before his conversion to Christianity.
| Author | C. S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis, 1898–1963) |
| First edition | 1945, Geoffrey Bles (London) |
| First US edition | 1946, Macmillan (New York) |
| Serialized as | “Who Goes Home?” in The Guardian, 1944–1945 |
| Structure | Preface + 14 unnamed, numbered chapters |
| Copyright status | Still under copyright (C. S. Lewis Company Ltd. / HarperCollins) |
This edition’s table of contents and chapter count were verified against the Internet Archive catalogue record and independent bibliographic sources to confirm all fourteen chapters and the Preface are represented here, in the correct order, with nothing skipped.
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