Just finishing up my Susan musings, I was wondering why it is that great authors so often are followed by lame, talentless hacks. The quintessential example is Christopher Tolkien, of course.
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On 22 January 1957 C.S. Lewis wrote to a boy named Martin: “The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end-in her own way.”
In 1980 a cloistered Carmelite nun in Flemington, New Jersey, wrote an eighth chronicle of Narnia, telling what happened to Susan, and called it The Centaur’s Cavern. It was so good that she soon found a Protestant publisher who wanted to bring it out. The altruistic plan was to make it extremely clear that this was not by C. S. Lewis, and to donate all profits to the work of Mother Teresa. One of Lewis’s personal friends, the well-known author Sheldon Vanauken, endorsed the project; and everyone involved felt sure that Lewis would have approved. But those in control of the Lewis Estate turned the nun down flat. Narnia was very private property, and no creative nuns were allowed to trespass in the name of charity.
The right to issue new books about Narnia was evidently being reserved for whoever might offer high enough financial gain to the owners of the Lewis Estate.
