C.S. Lewis called the fictional country in The Pilgrim’s Regress “Puritania.” The 1933 allegorical novel follows John, a traveler who leaves his home in search of the Island and encounters various landscapes, rulers, and intellectual temptations.
Puritania is a land shaped by restrictive moralism and religious legalism. Its name evokes Puritanism, but Lewis’s use of the setting is part of a broader satirical map of modern ideas and spiritual conditions. The novel was his first published work of prose fiction.
The book was written after Lewis’s conversion to Christianity and reflects his engagement with arguments about faith, reason, politics, and culture. It is less familiar to general readers than The Chronicles of Narnia, and the allegory can be difficult because its characters and places often represent several related ideas rather than a single simple equivalent.