If you are looking for other C.S. Lewis biographies, you could try Becoming C.S. Lewis (1898–1918): A Biography of Young Jack Lewis by Dr. Harry Lee Poe. Granted, I have not read the biography yet, but I have met the author, and he seems very knowledgeable about C.S. Lewis and cares deeply about his writings (he teaches a college course on C.S. Lewis’s life and works). He is currently working on a second biography about C.S. Lewis’s later life and conversion to Christianity. 

There is also this book: The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles William by Philip Zaleski. I probably got a fifth of the way though it before I became busy and had to return it to the library. I would like to pick it up again when I have time. It has a heavy focus on Lewis and Tolkien (Barfield and William get a few chapters but not nearly as much as Lewis and Tolkein), and it takes more of a secular approach, with not as much of a focus on their faiths, from what I could tell. It has been a while since I’ve read it though.

Hope this helps @courtenay!  

Thanks, @wanderer! I've got too much on my to-read list at the moment (and may be moving house some time in the next few months, which complicates things even further), but I'll make a note of those.

The news section of NarniaWeb has a "Did you know?" article for this month about some of the fragmentary drafts and plot ideas for Narnia that Walter Hooper included in Past Watchful Dragons, which I was recommending earlier in this thread. For anyone who's interested in the "time-travel Narnia story" mentioned there, here's a little more from the list of ideas quoted in that article — it's simply titled "PLOTS" and was found in one of Lewis's notebooks. Hooper describes it as "written in what looks like a very hurried hand, as if it were dashed off the moment it came into [Lewis's] head". This is the first item in the list:

SHIP. Two children somehow got on board a ship of ancient build. Discover presently that they are sailing in time (backwards): the captain will bring them to islands that have not existed for millennia. Approach islands. Attack by enemies. Children captured. Discover that the first captain was really taking them because his sick king needs blood of a boy in the far future. Nevertheless prefer the Capt. and his side to their soi-disant [so-called] rescuers. Escape and return to their first hosts. The blood giving, not fatal, and happy ending. Various islands (of Odyssey and St-Brendan) can be thrown in. Beauty of the ship the initial spell. To be a v. green and pearly story.

You can definitely see elements of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in this, but it would have turned out a very different story if Lewis had stuck with his original ideas. I wonder if the "capture" episode eventually developed into the incident in Dawn Treader where the main characters are captured by slave traders in the Lone Islands? Also the idea of blood being needed to heal someone comes up at the end of The Silver Chair, where Aslan's blood brings the dead Caspian back to life, but there it has a much more obvious Biblical parallel than Lewis's initial idea in these notes.

Further on in the same list of "Plots" there's the mention of "a magic picture" that's a portal between the fantasy world and ours — "One of the children gets thro' the frame into the picture and one of the creatures gets out of the picture into our world" — plus a "fairy-tale" royal court "into wh. erupts a child from our world", and this final suggestion:

SEQUEL TO L.W.W. The present tyrants to be Men. Intervening history of Narnia told nominally by the Dwarf but really an abstract of his story wh. amounts to telling it in my own person.

I'm not sure whether or not that last note was meant to be connected with the ones about the time-travelling ship and the magic picture, but there we can see these plot ideas were definitely written after Lewis had finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but before he wrote the first sequel. Of course, the last idea there is the basis of Prince Caspian, and that's what Lewis went on to develop into the next Narnia story, before coming back to the ideas of the picture and the ship (but now minus the time-travel) for the third book. Unfortunately Lewis doesn't seem to have kept very many of his early drafts and notes as he was writing the Chronicles, so these and a few other tantalising hints (especially the "Lefay Fragment") are the only direct glimpses we get of how his imagination was working as the stories developed...

I recently stumbled across a Lewis biography (on Etsy, of all websites!) that I'd never heard of before — The Secret Country of C.S. Lewis, by Anne Arnott, published in 1974 (this is a 1976 Hodder Christian Paperbacks edition). It's described on the back as "A biography of C.S. Lewis for young people", and this is the blurb:

This book brings to life a fascinating man and shows something of his almost reluctant journey into faith. Anne Arnott portrays the lively, sensitive little boy; the unhappy, brilliant schoolboy; the atheist; the poet; the courageous soldier sickened by war; the undergraduate; the powerful story-teller and man of letters. Generations of readers of the Chronicles of Narnia and the great and mysterious adventures of the boys and girls who went there, will enjoy this delightful book.

Mildly amusing to read that the book is aimed at "Generations of readers of the Chronicles of Narnia" when, at the time when it was published, the Chronicles had been in print for barely 20 years, which by my count is just about one generation! But I guess it's also referring to generations to come, and there have certainly been more of those since then, and the Chronicles are still being read and loved, so...

I have my doubts that this book will be as heartwarming as Jack's Life by Douglas Gresham, which I read a couple of years or so ago, but I'm about to start reading it now and will post my thoughts afterwards! Has anyone else here read this particular one?

@courtenay I've got a secondhand copy of that one. It's entirely derived from other books, and creates dialogue from things Lewis had written. It's perhaps a watered-down bio for kids. I'll be interested to see what you think.

A friend posted that she'd found a fiction book about an 18 year old girl who met C.S.Lewis. Within 24 hours she was warning me that I would be driven mad at the inaccuracies.  Here are some of her examples:

First, although in the English family they refer to Mum (well done), maths is always math. Even in the mouth of CSL. Circa 1906, Jack and Warnie are doing their Greek homework. Which consists of "filling in the blanks" in a "worksheet". 

The English mother is wearing brown tweed pants. The nurse at the hospital in 1951 wears a name badge with her first name. There are plastic chairs at the hospital. CSL uses the word "prequel".

Shillings is unaccountably spelt "schillings" on three occasions.

@coracle I'm somewhat younger than you and Australian and I'm already at those inaccuracies, which I understood even before reading your explanations of them!!!

(Not to mention, if the English mother's garment is actually described in the text as "brown tweed pants", that's another massive error. In the UK, the outer garments for one's legs are strictly trousers and "pants" are always underwear!! )

I've written elsewhere about what I thought of Becoming Mrs Lewis, i.e. not much — I gave up after the first few chapters, as it was written in such a soap-opera-romance style that it just didn't appeal to me at all. The author acknowledges Douglas Gresham as giving her his blessing to write that one too. I've never met Mr Gresham, but I would guess he's simply being kind to an enthusiastic writer of fiction and leaving off criticising her, since she's not breaching any copyrights and there's nothing inherently "wrong" in what she's doing. I doubt he was asked to be an actual editor / proofreader for either book and I would guess his "approval" doesn't necessarily mean he personally agrees with every word that she's written! He's written his own very beautiful and moving accounts of Joy and Jack's relationship and Jack's own life story, and he's naturally in a better position to know about them first hand than anyone else who's still alive, so possibly he figures readers themselves should be smart enough to understand that Ms Callahan's works are fiction and make their own judgments accordingly.

Oh yes, as for the Anne Arnott biography we were talking about earlier, I started it, but as it wasn't saying anything I hadn't heard before, I got rather bored with it and went onto other books on my lengthy to-read list. I may go back to it some time, but I'm not sure I'll bother, especially since, as you say (Coracle), it doesn't have any original material.

@coracle I just wanted to thank you for sharing your friend's letter. It made me chuckle. (And I was actually able to figure out what the inaccuracies were just from the context. Kudos to me, I guess, or maybe kudos to your friend.)

The strangest one is about the shillings. The rest of the stuff I can chalk up to the author doing no research and apparently having no editor. But her computer's autocorrect should have picked up on that misspelling. 

@col-klink if I did read it, I would probably find some more.

Schillings were the basic Austrian coinage until 2002 (when it adopted the Euro). Perhaps her editor thought the two spellings were interchangeable.

The shilling was used in UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and other British Commonwealth countries. 20 shillings made a pound. (see Britannica online for info)

In NZ it was replaced by the 10c coin (1967 - our pound got converted to two NZ dollars) and in UK by a 5p coin (1971 - their pound remained a pound, equal to 100 new pence). 

@courtenay the whole pants thing is hilarious. Jack and Warnie certainly wore tweed, but I'm unsure whether ladies would have done. Trousers were not really acceptable for daywear even in the 1960s, and I don't recall wearing them for my office job in the mid 70s here.
I've often said that Americans are so funny, dressing in a vest and pants to go out! Sorry, dears, but the English would be outraged to see you walking down the street in your underwear! (US vest = UK waistcoat, UK vest = US undershirt)

The trousers thing reminds me of seeing a production of  Shadowlands in Chichester, England (a famous theatre). The actor playing Joy Gresham strode into her first scene in white Oxford Bags (baggy trousers), calling out "Is there anyone here by the name 'Lois'?"  Her American accent was not quite right, and nor were the clothes.

I've just discovered that Narnia scholar Devin Brown — who has written a number of books on the Chronicles that I've read and very much enjoyed — wrote a biography of Lewis himself a few years ago, called A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis. I read the parts of it that were available to view on Amazon and liked what I could see of it, so I've ordered a copy, which should arrive in the next few days. I don't know if it will say much about Lewis that I haven't heard before, but it'll be interesting to find out!

Here's part of the blurb as featured on Amazon:

At the fiftieth anniversary of his death [2013], Lewis expert Devin Brown brings the beloved author's story to life in a fresh, accessible, and moving biography through focusing on Lewis's spiritual journey.

Although it was clear from the start that Lewis would be a writer, it was not always clear he would become a Christian. Drawing on Lewis's autobiographical works, books by those who knew him personally, and his apologetic and fictional writing, this book tells the inspiring story of Lewis's journey from cynical atheist to joyous Christian and challenges readers to follow their own calling. The book allows Lewis to tell his own life story in a uniquely powerful manner while shedding light on his best-known works.

Again, it may just be repeating things that other authors (including Lewis himself!) have already said, but "fresh" and "accessible" are always good. I've tried at least a couple of longer biographies of Lewis that I found very dry and uninspiring, so it's good that there are others that may serve as a better introduction for people who want to find out more about him and his spiritual journey in particular.