Who wrote the foreword to C.S. Lewis’s 1956 autobiography Surprised by Joy?

Owen Barfield wrote the foreword to C.S. Lewis’s 1956 autobiography Surprised by Joy.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life recounts Lewis’s childhood, education, intellectual development, and movement from atheism toward Christianity. Owen Barfield, a philosopher, writer, and close friend of Lewis, contributed the foreword. Their friendship was part of the wider literary and intellectual circle known as the Inklings.

The book does not provide a complete account of Lewis’s entire life. It concentrates mainly on his early years and ends around the point at which he became a Christian. Lewis discusses experiences of intense longing, which he called “Joy,” and explains how those experiences influenced his imagination and religious thought.

Readers sometimes expect J.R.R. Tolkien to be connected to every major Lewis publication because Tolkien was one of Lewis’s closest literary friends. Tolkien did influence Lewis’s return to Christianity, but Barfield wrote this particular foreword. Surprised by Joy was published by Geoffrey Bles in 1956.