Leah Betts wrote:Like a lot of people I believed that Lewis excluded Susan from Aslan's Country because she had the gall to mature and move on to "lipstick and boys". Lewis may have had many problems when writing the books - his sexism and misogyny, his fat hate in PC and his stereotyping of Islam etc. etc. but people are right that Susan didn't enter Aslan's Country because she didn't die. She's been given a chance to redeem herself with a long life.
Welcome to NarniaWeb!

Yes, Susan, and why she wasn't in the train smash, is a fascinating topic which has kept a lot of people entertained almost separately from the Narnia stories themselves.
Personally, I don't see C.S.Lewis as sexist, racist or stereotyping of Islam. I've heard he didn't like to study Sheharazade (Arabian Nights), a series of stories allegedly told by a princess, the latest of a series who had been married to some Persian prince or other who executed any new wife who displeased him. Also called 1001 nights, this collection of stories kept the murderous bridegroom entertained so that he kept putting off the inevitable execution. There is even a Sheharazade reference in HHB, where Aravis, a Calormene Tarkeena, has had good training in story telling. It is also clear from both HHB & LB that the religion practised in Calormen has nothing to do with Islam, being polytheistic and idolatrous in nature. And considering Women's Lib hadn't yet happened til after CSL died, in 1963, he did well to have even Lucy able to answer back so clearly and effectively any examples of sexism his male characters showed.
The more I read comments about the ending of Chapter 12 of Last Battle, the more I am beginning to think that there is something fishy about Peter's, Jill's, Eustace's and Polly's remarks about Susan. For it is not only what is said there, but what is not said that is bothering me. C.S.Lewis, himself, (
Letters to Children, 1957) wrote:
“The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end . . . in her own way.”According to Doug Gresham commenting at the end of the Focus on the Family
Last Battle CD's, C.S.L also felt he could not write any more Narnia stories without their being forced and that seven was a good number. Lewis almost invited people to write their own stories to fill any Narnian gaps, and plenty of fan-fiction writers have taken him at his word over Susan. He has also made many remarks throughout the Narnia series about eavesdropping, and Aslan's telling people only their own stories. Nevertheless, there has been much debate online over
Whatever happened to Susan One writer, Neil Gaiman, even wrote in 2004 a short story about Susan and her role in Children's Literature, called
The Problem of Susan, part of his published anthology,
Fragile Things, which has also been debated hotly online. This adult tale has a journalist, Greta Campion interviewing an elderly Professor of children's literature, Susan Hastings, whom the journalist believes is the same Susan Pevensie who lost her siblings in a train accident many years previously. Greta says (Gaiman, 2004 pp 193-4) in this story about a story about Susan:
"It's just that I remember that sequence so vividly. In the Last Battle. Where you learn there was a train crash on the way back to school, and everyone was killed. Except for Susan, of course. ....You know, that used to make me so angry...
All the other kids go off to Paradise, and Susan can't go. She's no longer a friend of Narnia because she is too fond of lipsticks and nylons and invitations to parties. I even talked to my English teacher about it, about the problem of Susan, when I was twelve....
She said that even though Susan had been refused Paradise then she still had time to repent while she lived."Please note that in Gaiman's story, how inaccurately and sloppily both Greta the journalist and her English teacher quote both the relevant
Last Battle incident and C.S.Lewis, himself. Now C.S.Lewis was a Professor of English literature at both Oxford and Cambridge and used to picking his words very carefully indeed. Including in the
Last Battle.
A correspondent in
this Problem of Susan discussion noted that right at the end of
Last Battle, Lucy finds out that her Non-Narnian parents, who had, unbenownst to her, caught the same train to Bristol, and had therefore been in the train accident, had also gone to Aslan's Country, no doubt accompanied by unnamed fellow passengers.
It is worth noting that Susan wasn't at the 7 Friends of Narnia meeting that Tirian attended. And it cannot be emphasized more, that Susan wasn't killed in the train crash. Unlike Peter and Edmund, she was not on the station platform. Nor was she in the train, like the rest, when the train collided with the station. A real train crash, as Aslan, himself, pointed out, due to human error. Based on one that really did happen in UK at the time C.S.Lewis wrote
Last Battle.
I'm finding it more and more ridiculous that this sloppy misreading of
Last Battle has so many people,
especially atheists like Phillip Pullman, expressing so much disapproval of a fictitional children's literature character like Susan being debarred from a Paradise they don't believe in anyway, even in real terms, let alone a children's novel. Apparently they think that Susan was debarred on account of her conforming to everyday materialist concerns, rather than her dismissing Narnia as children's games. However, what are atheists, themselves, saying when they argue that there is no world but this one? There is no life after death, there is no salvation, and that the central tenet of Easter and Christianity (John 3: 16) is a lie?
What did Peter actually mean when he said that Susan was no longer a friend of Narnia? And why would he be the one to say so? Why not one of the others? And why did each say what they were meant to?
P.S. I have highlighted CSL's own comment in red, and the quotation from Gaiman's short story in blue.