Even as a teenager Jack Lewis was conscious of his tendency to let his reading shape, if not actually replace, his experience of ‘real life’. In an early letter to his friend Arthur Greeves he wrote:

Later in The Personal Heresy he described literature as ‘a voyage beyond the limits of [the reader's as well as the writer ‘s] personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion’ (PH 26–7). And in one of his last books, An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis spoke eloquently of:

While remaining wary of the tendency to make a kind of religion out of aesthetic experience (cf. ‘Christianity and Literature’ in Christian Reflections), Lewis nevertheless clearly does see the act of reading as at least analogous to certain kinds of religious experience. Literary experience and Joy have a similar relation to Christian faith; as long as neither of them is made into an idolatrous substitute for Christian faith, for Lewis they may provide invaluable experiences which can point towards, and even participate in, the truth of Christianity.