Shadowlands The Story

Especially with Hollywood bringing the beloved “Chronicles of Narnia” to the big screen, most people are at least peripherally aware of C.S. Lewis as the creator of a beloved world of talking beasts and grand adventure. Some might even know the man behind the childrens’ books as a witty and erudite theologian and academic. Fewer still are aware of the man who found love late in life in a way that would ultimately challenge both his understanding of himself, and his faith in God.

Lewis’ deep entrenchment in the role of a quintessential Oxford don—the brilliant, slightly-absent-minded professor in the male-dominated academic world—is shaken by the unexpected arrival of an American fan. In her own way, Joy Gresham epitomizes everything that Lewis is not: brash and forward, prone to questioning everything, experienced in both love and loss. Their developing attraction to each other is a complex process that must work through his inability to understand the essence of intimate emotional connection, and through her experiences of deeply loving emotionally-unavailable men. Yet somehow these two unlikely soulmates manage to find those rare points of connection that allow love to root, and grow in such a way that when tragedy strikes, something transcendent and greater than either of them remains.