Which C.S. Lewis novel, published in 1956, retells the Cupid and Psyche myth from a woman’s perspective?

Till We Have Faces, published in 1956, retells the Cupid and Psyche myth from a woman’s perspective. It was C.S. Lewis’s last completed novel and is often regarded as one of his most mature and psychologically complex works.

The narrator is Orual, a princess of Glome. She tells the story of her relationship with her half-sister Psyche and of her complaint against the gods. Lewis draws on the ancient myth associated with Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, but he changes the setting, emphasis, and narrative voice.

The novel is not a simple retelling in which every event maps directly onto the classical source. It examines jealousy, love, self-knowledge, religious experience, and the difficulty of seeing one’s own motives clearly. The title refers to the need for people to become fully revealed or to speak honestly before they can understand themselves.

Till We Have Faces is sometimes overlooked beside Narnia and Mere Christianity, but Lewis himself considered it a particularly important achievement. Its publication in 1956 came near the end of his fiction-writing career.