I’m uncertain, again, if Lewis was fully content with the change, and he even signed a letter to Owen Barfield-to whom the book was dedicated-“Yours, The Alligator of Love,” a parody of the title. I have the feeling that it was a point of contention, and the editor of Lewis’ letters, Walter Hooper, notes that he was “eventually convinced” to make the change. The publisher decided to change it to The Allegory of Love-a more poetic title, perhaps, but one that doesn’t represent the book as well.
He wanted to name it The Allegorical Love Poem, and referenced it as such in his correspondence.
His title of his first academic book, the one that established his career as a careful scholar, was not as easily settled. It was an allegory patterned after Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in which Lewis’ return-or regress-is essential to the story. Lewis’ first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, was completely evident to him. Personally, I think Spirits in Bondage is a more precise title-evocative of different kinds of restrictions than “prison” draws to my mind, specifically the kind addressed into the materialistic and spiritual struggles of the poetry-but I’m not sure that he was ever satisfied. He rejected it at first as straying too far from the 1 Peter reference, but eventually used it. He struggled with the title and it was his father that finally suggested “Spirits in Bondage,” a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost. “I don’t know whether I shall be able to find another that expresses so aptly to the general scheme of the book….” (letter to his father). Lewis was disappointed when he realized that another author, Robert Hitchens, had written A Spirit in Prison a decade earlier. The original title, however, was Spirits in Prison, referencing 1 Peter 3:19. We know his very first book as Spirits in Bondage-now available free in the public domain. I’ve had editors change titles from time to time, but mostly I can come up with something that works. I eventually sent in a piece that I feel has an awful title-but then, it might be an awful novel: I wrote it in a weekend, after all. Every name I thought of was wrong: lame, pretentious, trite, non-representative, or just not right. As midnight on the last day approached, I had completed my 150 page novel, but had utterly failed to name it. I recently competed in the 3 Day Novel Contest, a literary marathon where one writes for 72 hours, hoping to finish an entire novel in that time.
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