Women as Saints and Slatterns in Lewis’s Shorter Fiction

Abstract

Before Lewis died in November, 1963, only two items of his shorter fiction had been published: ‘The Shoddy Lands’, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction of February 1956, and ‘Ministering Angels’ in Volume 13 of the same magazine, in January 1958. A posthumous collection of Lewis’s writings included another short story, ‘Forms of Things Unknown’, together with the two previously published, and a selection of Lewis’s literary essays.¹ In 1977, Lewis’s literary executor, Walter Hooper, added two incomplete and hitherto unpublished pieces, ‘The Dark Tower’ and ‘After Ten Years’, and a previously unpublished short story, ‘The Man Born Blind’ to a further collection incorporating only the fiction from the earlier volume, so that, according to Hooper, Lewis’s ‘unpublished and uncollected fiction’ is incorporated in ‘a single volume’ (Hooper, Preface to The Dark Tower and Other Stories 13). This is not quite accurate: there is, as discussed in Chapter 2, a fragment of what seems to have been intended as a novel included in the unpublished record of the Lewis family (The Lewis Papers, collected by Warren Lewis and held in the Marion E Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois; copies are held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford). Neither The Lewis Papers nor this fragment has been published, at least to my knowledge.