Although C.S. Lewis didn’t get married until later in life, he spent a lot of time over the preceding decades thinking theologically about marriage and the general differences between men and women. We know about some of this thought process from his lengthy decades-long correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers (this friendship of Lewis and Sayers is the subject of Gina Dalfonzo’s excellent book, Dorothy and Jack). But also, these thoughts on gender permeate Lewis’s fiction—and this is the topic of Josh Herring’s new book, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender (Davenant Press, 2026).
Dr. Josh Herring is Professor of Classical Education and Humanities at Thales College and the founder of the Logres Institute for Classical Liberal Studies. He and his wife Jennifer live in Wendell, NC.
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Nadya Williams: This is a book about C. S. Lewis, but it's about quite a bit more than that, since the issues involved have been very much in the news over the past decade, perhaps in ways that Lewis hadn't foreseen precisely. Can you tell a little bit about your thought process that led to this book. What were the questions that you had set out to answer? When did you realize that this was a book-length exploration rather than something shorter?
Josh Herring: Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve is based on my doctoral dissertation; it was always going to be a book-length project. Back in 2019, I attended an in-person seminar at the Russell Kirk Center in Mecosta, MI. There I met Dr. Ben Lockerd; over dinner, I mentioned that I had always wanted to read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Little did I know that Lockerd was a past president of the international Spenser academic association, and loved introducing people to this poetic masterpiece. We set up a tutorial and got to know one another over a semester of reading Spenserian poetry. The following year, I proposed another tutorial with Lockerd, this time exploring the writings of C.S. Lewis. By that point, I was actively looking for a dissertation topic, and I found this one when I read Perelandra.
My career had shifted—I was out of the classical classroom and serving a stint in administrative leadership at my school. I was becoming increasingly aware of the transgender issues that were facing schools. Bathrooms, sports teams, pronouns—all of it was on the rise. I worked for a boss who did not share my convictions, and I was searching for helpful language. How could I convey the importance of affirming one’s given gender without reaching for the biblical language of Genesis 1-2? Perelandra was my clue to the idea that Lewis might have what I was looking for. I ran into lines like “Gender is more real than sex” —and I started tracking where else Lewis talked about gender. I did something of a research dive and discovered that there was not a lot in print about Lewis’s views on gender (and some that were in print were just wrong). Suddenly, I had a dream dissertation topic: an under-explored area, points of academic controversy, and a confined body of texts to study.
I spent the following year reading, researching, and making connections across Lewis’s writings. Barfield, of course, was right: “Everything Lewis thinks is in everything Lewis says.” Once I was looking for the gender thread, it appeared everywhere. Dr. Lockered pushed me to include a big focus on Spenser and Lewis; he gave me great counsel.
Very few people today read Spenser. Lewis loved Spenser and called The Faerie Queene a collection of “hymns to life.” Ch. 2 in my book traces Lewis’s appreciation for Spenser, and that’s the truly unique contribution to Lewisian scholarship my book makes. So, by the time I knew I had a clear body of evidence to support a specific theory of gender, and a place to highlight Lewis’s connection to Spenser, it was a matter of working up the prospectus and then writing the chapters. Across 2022-2023, I drafted the dissertation. It went through some revisions in turning into the book, but the essence is the same.
Over the course of writing, my argument shifted substantially. I began thinking I had found Lewis’s rejection of transgender ideology; by the time I reached the conclusion, the argument had grown. I actually wrote about Lewis’s theory of reality, and gender became a site for him to apply that theory. Lewis wants to cultivate gratitude for the gift of creation within his readers, and that gratitude extends far beyond application to gender.
Nadya Williams: Who is your target audience in this book? What do you hope your target audience will get from reading it? To put it in other words, perhaps, what is your main message here?
Josh Herring: I wrote this book with a few different groups in mind. I say from the outset that I’m not looking to persuade those who accept the propositions of transgender ideology. Instead, I want to offer language, models, and images to those who seek to articulate a positive vision of gender. By 2022, plenty of people had already made the negative case against transgender ideology (I’m thinking primarily of Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? and Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, alongside more academic works like Abigail Favale’s Genesis of Gender). I wasn’t trying to rehash those arguments. What I saw as missing was a positive articulation of what it means to be a man or a woman in a way that parents, teachers, and pastors could publicly articulate and praise those who are evidently masculine or evidently feminine. Lewis has such a vision, and I think reading him with that idea in view helps parents, teachers, homeschool leaders, classical teachers, and anyone else working with children be ready to see the fullness of who God has made each child to be and help him or her understand the goodness of being made male or female.
The message of my book is somewhat straightforward: Lewis believed that every human being is made in the divine image, male or female, as part of the giftedness of creation. That gift is glorious, and complex; the proper response to a glorious, complex gift is to unfold its complexity and grow in appreciation of the gift. There are no takebacks, no exchanges of this gift. Instead, every boy needs to learn what it is to be a man, and every girl what it is to be a woman. We ought not shy away from the fact that there are real differences—instead, we celebrate the beauty of who God has made us to be.
Nadya Williams: I appreciated your description of your methodology early on in the book as displaying, among other things, "the interconnected nature of humanities research." What do you mean by this? How does this come through in this book, and what does this mean for Christian humanities research in particular?
Josh Herring: Early on in my research I discovered that there are at least two paths to writing this kind of project. I could read all the Lewis scholarship that’s been written over the past sixty years (an astonishing amount), or I could limit the scope of my project to providing a close reading of a theme in Lewis’s writings. Given my goal of finishing this project within a year, I chose the second route. My background is in history, theology, and great books—so the idea of reading closely in Lewis, and exploring a specific theme, greatly appealed. I had to confine myself to reading widely within Lewis, and my book interacts minimally with secondary literature. I did read some of the giants in the field, but for the most part I focused on Lewis.
For humanities writ large, this is a move back to what literary criticism once was. Decades ago, the goal of literary criticism was to help people read more deeply in a work of literary value. Lewis talks about this in An Experiment in Criticism—the modern turn towards critical theory has mostly produced unreadable works about books that people should just read themselves. There is a small value in having an introductory apparatus—that’s what I want my book to do. Good criticism should offer pointers and highlights that the reader notices and confirms when reading the original book. That’s what I want to get back to—my hope is that in reading my book, readers will see a thread running through Lewis’s work that they had previously missed. Such deeper insight is what the best humanists bring to their scholarship.
For Christian humanities scholarship in particular, I think this approach explains part of what it means to “take captive every thought to the mind of Christ.” The Christian humanities scholar is seeking for and foremost to deeply understand the nature of a text, and then to judge the text based on whether it does, or does not, align with reality. The Christian humanist scholar is seeking not just another publication, but rather to help others become more fully human through his academic explorations.
Nadya Williams: Which of C. S. Lewis's books is your favorite, and why?
Josh Herring: It’s so hard to pick a favorite. In the Ransom Trilogy, I love Perelandra for the beauty of the setting, the drama, the literary play. It has far more ideas than Out of the Silent Planet, and I think the plot is more unified than the plot of That Hideous Strength.
In Narnia, The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle are tied. I love what Lewis does through these books. These two books elevate Narnia to the realm of poetic theology; they add creation and eschatology to the world where the children’s adventures draw them into relation with Aslan, and I think they make Lewis’s children series a poetic triumph.
Nadya Williams: What are the bigger questions that fascinate you in your thinking, reading, writing, and teaching?
Josh Herring: I love looking at the intersection of history, literature, and philosophy; I am a generalist who loves stories. We live in an age that has largely forgotten the necessary grounds of forming the next generation of authors. Literary creativity does not emerge out of the ether; it grows within minds well fertilized by the great ideas and great texts of those who have gone before. So, I think it is essential to help others explore the great tradition, to learn how to participate in the Great Conversation happening across Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, London, and Philadelphia (to borrow Russell Kirk’s framing).