Lucy Barfield was the goddaughter who inspired the dedication of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis addressed the book’s dedication to her, explaining that children’s stories eventually become unsuitable for their original young readers.
Barfield was the adopted daughter of Owen Barfield, a literary scholar and one of Lewis’s close Oxford associates. Lewis’s dedication affectionately imagined Lucy growing old enough to return to fairy tales, giving the book a personal connection beyond its fictional character Lucy Pevensie.
Lucy Pevensie is a character in the Narnia books, but she was not the real-life recipient of the dedication. Joy Davidman was Lewis’s wife, and Jill Pole appears in later Narnia stories. The dedication therefore links a real child in Lewis’s circle with the fictional world of Narnia.