What title did C.S. Lewis use for his 1955 spiritual autobiography?

C.S. Lewis used the title Surprised by Joy for his 1955 spiritual autobiography.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life was published in 1955. It describes Lewis’s childhood, education, intellectual development, movement away from Christianity, and eventual return to Christian belief.

The title refers to a form of longing or intense desire that Lewis connected with experiences of beauty, literature, and imagination. He treated this longing as an important thread in his spiritual and intellectual history rather than simply as a record of events.

The book is not the same as A Grief Observed, which concerns Lewis’s experience after Joy Davidman’s death. Nor is it a conventional complete memoir: it ends before much of Lewis’s best-known public writing and leaves some later periods outside its main scope.