One Huge and Complex Episode
The Hidden Influence of Mrs. Moore on C.S. Lewis’s Faith and Fiction
“I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted.1” This elusive line in Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, has left many biographers and readers trying to pinpoint what exactly this episode might have been. Roger Lanceyln Green and Walter Hooper, came to the conclusion in their biography of Lewis that the most likely answer is Lewis’s relationship with Mrs. Moore.2
For anyone who has heard Mrs. Moore’s name and looked into her connection to Lewis, she is certainly a complex piece of his story. Mrs. Moore, or Minto, as Lewis referred to her, was the mother of Lewis’s college roommate, Paddy Moore. Before the two young men were shipped off to war, they made a pact to care for each other’s surviving parents if one of them were to die in battle, an extravagant promise to make at the age of 18 as one waited for marching orders into what we now call World War I. Tragically, Paddy did not return home, and Lewis took his promise seriously, caring for Mrs. Moore until her death in 1951.
As is true for most people, Mrs. Moore is presented as multifaceted in biographers' accounts. She has been remembered as a charitable, maternal figure. She hosted Paddy’s Oxford friends, made the Kilns (the home she shared with Lewis) a haven of hospitality where “even strangers were welcome,3” and encouraged Lewis to shelter children evacuated from London during the Blitz, an experience that lent a spark to the creation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Mrs. Moore had also endured the ending of a marriage and experienced the trauma of losing her son to the war.
For Lewis, who had lost his own mother when he was only nine, Mrs. Moore provided a maternal presence he craved. He wrote early on, “Mrs. Moore took my temperature and put me to bed,4” a deceptively simple statement that conveys her role as a surrogate mother.5
Whatever the terms of the relationship, not all of it was warm, domestic bliss. Mrs. Moore could be demanding and possessive, and as a hardened atheist since the death of her son she had little patience for Lewis’s blossoming faith. Lewis said, after her passing, that her presence in the house brought “senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares.6”
In letters to close friends like Arthur Greeves and Sister Penelope, Lewis’s fatigue from the relationship seeped through. He called the Kilns during her residence “not a very happy house7” and said when it was time for her to move into a retirement home, “there is no denying that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence.8”
As with so much of Lewis’s personal life, Mrs. Moore’s impact extended beyond everyday life and into his writings. Many readers can note striking echoes of her personality in some of Lewis’s characters. For instance, the mother figure in chapter 11 of The Great Divorce bears some resemblance to Mrs. Moore in her suffocating tendencies. And we may see Mrs. Moore in Letter 3 of The Screwtape Letters, in the relationship between the patient and his mother.
In Letter 3, the patient’s mother provides a wealth of pitfalls for Wormwood to tap into, with Screwtape encouraging him to build up “a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks” to encourage “the neglect of the obvious” spiritual traits the newly minted Christian patient can be practicing.
The illustration of these niggling daily annoyances feels so relatable, likely because it stems from Lewis’s human experience. Lewis, a “patient” himself, was working to develop those well-known christian virtues of patience, grace, and love of thy neighbor, and in Mrs. Moore he found a daily opportunity to practice. Paul McCusker writes, “Showing Christ’s love to Mrs. Moore, even when she was being extremely difficult, was a tangible way to demonstrate the reality of Jesus whom she didn’t want to accept.9”
Living with Mrs. Moore required Lewis to put his faith into action. By viewing these daily struggles through the lens of the Enemy’s strategy, Lewis helps readers recognize how their own mundane frustrations can serve as training grounds for spiritual growth. Lewis writes in a letter to Arthur Greeves:
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.…
Isn’t it hard to go on being patient, to go on supplying sympathy? One’s stock of love turns out, when the testing time comes, to be so very inadequate: I suppose it is well that one should be forced to discover the fact!10
Mrs. Moore’s story within Lewis’s life is, as he himself described, “huge and complex.” She gave him a maternal relationship after the loss of his mother, spurred his hospitality toward others, and provided an opportunity to practice the Christian virtues he held dear—even when it was difficult.
Their relationship may not have been perfect, and yet it profoundly shaped the man Lewis became. It colored his fiction, deepened his theology, and revealed the humanity behind one of the 20th century’s most beloved authors.
For us, Mrs. Moore is a reminder that the people who challenge us most can also leave the deepest imprints on our lives. And in the daily struggle to show love, even in the face of imperfections, we find the opportunity to extend the divine love11 we have received, to those around us.
Surprised by Joy ©1955 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.
Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter, C.S. Lewis: The Authorized and Revised Biography. “Oxford: The War and After.” (HarperCollins Entertainment, 2003), 44.
Paul McCusker, “What Do We Make of Lewis’ Relationship with Mrs. Moore?” Women and C.S. Lewis, edited by Carolyn Curtis and Mary Pomroy Key (Lion books, 2015)
Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter, C.S. Lewis: The Authorized and Revised Biography. “Oxford: The War and After.” (HarperCollins Entertainment, 2003), pp 39.
Many biographers speculate that Lewis’s relationship to Mrs. Moore might not have been completely platonic/maternal. For one perspective, you can read Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter, C.S. Lewis.
The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition ©2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.
Yours, Jack ©2009 CS Lewis Pte Ltd., 117.
Yours, Jack ©2009 CS Lewis Pte Ltd., 165.
Women and C.S. Lewis
Yours, Jack ©2009 CS Lewis Pte Ltd., 105.
For more on Lewis’s understanding on Divine Love, read The Four Loves.
It never ceases to amaze me how much our present outlook on life is the direct result of those who impacted our young lives. For better or worse, they've colored our glasses with a specific tint.
She was certainly named appropriately. To Lewis, she provided moore interruptions, moore suffocation, moore wranglings, etc., for which he needed moore patience!