Surprised by Joy is C.S. Lewis’s 1955 autobiography about his early intellectual and spiritual development.
The book traces Lewis’s childhood, education, reading, friendships, and gradual return to Christianity. It focuses especially on his experience of “Joy,” a term he used for an intense longing or stab of desire prompted by imagination, literature, and nature. Lewis described this experience as important to his intellectual and spiritual journey.
Surprised by Joy was published in 1955. Its narrative reaches Lewis’s conversion to Christianity but does not provide a complete account of every later stage of his life. The title alludes to a line from William Wordsworth’s poetry.
A Grief Observed, published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk in 1961, is a different book about grief after the death of Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman. That distinction helps separate Lewis’s early-life autobiography from his later reflections on bereavement.