Orual is the narrator and queen in C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces.
Published in 1956, the novel retells the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. Orual becomes ruler of the fictional kingdom of Glome and narrates the story as a complaint against the gods. Her account explores jealousy, possessive love, identity, and the difficulty of seeing oneself honestly.
Psyche is an important character, but she is not the narrator. The novel’s title comes from Orual’s gradual movement toward self-knowledge and truthful identity. Till We Have Faces was Lewis’s final published novel and differs in tone from the children’s fantasy of Narnia, making it especially important when studying the range of his fiction.