"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 is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get into Aslan's country in the end - in her own way." - C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children
As some of you may know, I am a heretic. And what I am about to say may very well shatter your 2456317 minds, be ye warned.
But I believe Lewis was planning or at least contemplating a sequel to Narnia.
First look at the above quote,
“But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get into Aslan's country in the end” (emphasis mine)
Rather an odd tense to use for a fictional character whose story is over don’t you think?
Compare it, if you like, to this alternative way of saying the same thing,
But she had plenty of time to mend, and perhaps she found a way into Aslan's country in the end”
That is, it is saying the same thing if Susan is no longer in play in our reality.
And then there is the matter of the rings, a horrendous lose end to be left dangling.
Records show that TLB was written in a very short period of time. Perhaps he just kept shoving this matter aside until later, and then never got around to it. Or perhaps he intentionally left the matter of Susan and the rings unresolved so that they could be resolved together in a latter book. A book that was never written, or was it? Partially at any rate. There is no doubt that the Lewis estate still has unpublished material. Could this be why they did not allow Centaur’s cave and Brave Again to be published?
Obviously it is not a full manuscript, or it would have been published by now. But even if it is just an outline, a few notes, rough ideas could it not be put into publishable form? Perhaps it never got beyond a vague idea, perhaps…
