Who wrote the C.S. Lewis novel Till We Have Faces?

C.S. Lewis wrote the novel Till We Have Faces.

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold was published in 1956. It is Lewis’s final novel and reworks the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche from the viewpoint of Orual, a princess in the fictional kingdom of Glome. The novel examines love, jealousy, self-knowledge, religion, and the ways people construct stories about themselves.

Lewis described the book as a retelling rather than a straightforward translation of the classical tale. Its setting and perspective distinguish it from the children’s Narnia books, and its psychological tone is often more mature and demanding. The novel was not part of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Readers sometimes attribute it to Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien because both writers were Oxford-based authors who drew on myth and medieval or classical sources. Tolkien did not write it. Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers were also Lewis’s literary contemporaries, but neither wrote this novel.