"Once Upon a Wardrobe" by Patti Callahan

Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not very far away… 

That phrase, which sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, is the centering theme of Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan. It’s a wonderful story, about legend and myth, about fairy tales, about C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. And it’s about story, and the role story plays in our lives. 

 

It’s 1950. Margaret “Megs” Devonshire is studying mathematics at Somerville College at Oxford. She’s into everything logical, precise, and measurable, because that’s how she makes sense of the world.

 

She has a brother, George, 10 years her junior, a brother she loves dearly and who is not likely to see his next birthday. He’s seriously ill with what sounds like a worsening heart condition. When she visits home, she learns that George has been reading a just published book called The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by Oxford’s own C.S. Lewis. And George wants to know if she’s met Lewis or talked with him, because he has an important question: where did Narnia come from?

 

Because she loves her brother, Megs is determined to find out. She starts by making an unannounced visit to The Kilns, the house where Lewis and his brother Warnie live. Warnie finds her in the garden and invites her to have tea.

 

Patti Callahan

That invitation will send Megs on a journey into fairy tales, legends, myths, and stories. After each meeting with the Lewis brothers, and she has several, they will explain where Narnia came from – by not explaining any such thing. “Here is the thing, Miss Devonshire,” Lewis says, “you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they write their stories. When the story is finished, he has forgotten a good deal of what writing it was like.”

 

(Speaking from my own experience, that is absolutely true.)

 

Megs’ journey into the imagination will lead her to romance – and to an unexpected journey for her and George.

 

Patti Callahan Henry is the bestselling author of 17 novels, including Becoming Mrs. Lewis, the story of Lewis’s wife Joy Davidman. She’s also published in numerous anthologies and short story collections. She is the co-host and co-creator of the weekly podcast Friends and Fiction. She received degrees from Auburn University and Georgia State University. Trained as a pediatric clinical nurse, she now writes full-time. Callahan lives in Alabama. 

 

Once Upon a Wardrobe will have you nodding at its wisdom, smiling, laughing, and often in tears. Not every story has a happy ending, but the true stories have the right ending. And Once Upon a Wardrobe is a true story.

 

(And a big hat tip to my wife Janet, who recommended I read it.)

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Why the Progress Debate Goes Nowhere – Samuel Matlock at The New Atlantis. 

 

Tyson Foods cut contracts with Missouri farmers and is working to silence their legal fight – Egan Ward at Missouri Independent.

 

Winter Apple – poem by David Whyte.

 

Royal slush – Gary Saul Morson at The New Criterion on The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa,