C.S. Lewis on Female Scholars: A Reply to John D. Rateliff

In John D. Rateliff’s study ‘The Missing Women: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lifelong Support for Women’s Higher Education’, Tolkien’s support of women is unfavourably contrasted with the supposedly dismissive attitude of C.S. Lewis. Rateliff offers three pieces of evidence in support of his argument that Lewis held a contemptuous attitude towards female research students in particular: a private letter by Lewis written in mock late-medieval English; Lewis’s comments about Damaris Tighe, the heroine in Charles Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion; and the character Jane Studdock in Lewis’s own novel That Hideous Strength. This paper argues that Rateliff’s evidence is not only limited but selective and misunderstood. What Lewis rebukes is academic complacency and vanity, not female researchers, many of whom Lewis respected and even befriended. The principle of biographical verification (grounding biographical speculations in biographical rather than imaginative literature) seriously complicates Rateliff’s argument.