In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a wardrobe leads into Narnia.
Lucy Pevensie discovers the passage while exploring a large wardrobe in an otherwise ordinary room. At first, she finds only coats and darkness, but she soon walks through into a snowy wood. The doorway establishes the book’s central contrast between a familiar English house and the magical world beyond it.
The story was published in 1950 as the first Narnia book released to readers, although it is often listed second in the series’ internal chronology. Lewis based the setting partly on wartime circumstances: the Pevensie children are sent away from London during the air raids and stay in the countryside home of Professor Kirke.
The wardrobe is sometimes treated as a simple magical portal, but it also helps frame Lucy’s experience of belief and discovery. Her siblings initially doubt her account, creating one of the novel’s recurring tensions between ordinary evidence and imaginative truth. The object became one of the most recognizable symbols associated with Lewis.