So, C. S. Lewis has been one of those authors posthumously prolific. His books were brought back into print, where they have been joined by previously uncollected works, especially literary essays and apologetics pieces. This good fortune for admirers of his works extends to his letters. The original life-and-letters put together by his brother Warnie, with the letters intercut with biographical passages, never saw print, being recast into a shorter, simpler form by Christopher Derrick (1966). As far back as 1981, when I first met him, Hooper was already, and already had been for several years, at work on Lewis's COMPLETE LETTERS. This finally came out in the form of the extensive if not comprehensive three-volume set of COLLECTED LETTERS (2000, 2004, 2007), totaling a massive 3999 pages -- and even this was a Selected, not Complete, collection.
Now comes word of a new, ambitious project to collect together all Lewis's surviving letters into one electronic database. Their estimation is that CSL wrote some 10,000 letters. Of these 3208 appear in COLLECTED LETTERS. Hooper had located another 70 or 80 more by the time of his death (2020), and the editors of the Correspondence Project have by their count expanded that by 732 uncollected letters or fragments. The goal is to establish a repository accessible to scholars all over the world.
The group heading up this ambitious project is a team of seven scholars: Norbert Feinendegen, Monika B. Hilder, Bruce R. Johnson, Laura Schmidt, Arend Smilde, Charlies W. Starr, & Jill Walker. I don't know all these names, but the ones I do know lead me to feel the project is in good hands. It's also a good sign that the announcement is being published more or less simultaneously in The JOURNAL OF INKLINGS STUDIES (from which I derive most of the information above*), VII, MYTHLORE, and SEHNSUCHT.
The Contact person is Bruce R. Johnson: cslletter@gmail.com
It'll be interesting to see how this major project covering years of work by many hands comes out. I know I've found Hooper's COLLECTED LETTERS of considerable value in my work on Tolkien and other Inklings over the years.
Yrs,
John R.
*Volume XIII.2 (2023)
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