by Laura Van DykeThe first thing that a reader will notice when they pick up Connor Salter’s recently-published collection of interviews on the Inklings and Inklings-adjacent figures is that this is a big book: running to nearly five hundred pages and including several appendices (though not, unfortunately, an index), it is a dense, tightly-packed gathering of diverse voices that will be a useful resource for anyone interested in learning more not only about the Oxford Inklings and those connected to them, but also about some of the many different scholars who have studied, read, and absorbed their work.
For a book titled The Other Inklings, it’s perhaps surprising that C.S. Lewis is given so much space. The collection opens with a long section of interviews that touch on multiple members of the group (often circling back to Lewis). Then Part Two, “Interviews on C.S. Lewis,” features interviews with scholars about Lewis’s life and work. Salter shows here his skill, however, in drawing out not only well-trodden but also underexplored aspects of Lewis (no easy feat today, in the context of a Lewis-saturated publishing industry)—particularly rich is his interview with Diana Pavlac Gyler, in which they discuss Gyler’s most recent book, The Major and the Missionary, which explores the fascinating correspondence between Lewis’s brother, Major Warren (“Warnie”) Lewis, and Blanche Biggs, a missionary doctor who lived and worked in Papua New Guinea. Also of note is the interview with Catherine Madsen, a (rare) Jewish scholar of the Inklings.
Part 3 features interviews with four scholars on Charles Williams, all of which touch on the legacy left by this “oddest Inkling,” to use Sørina Higgins’ apt term. In interviewing Higgins, Charles Franklyn Beach, David Llewellyn Dodds, and Sarah E. Thomson, the tensions in Williams’ work that arguably invest his writing with such unique energy come to the foreground. While Salter poses similar questions to some of the scholars—asking, for instance, about Williams’ complicated (to use a euphemism) relationships with women, or his hermetic interests—the responses are varied enough that all four interviews are certainly worth reading. Indeed, I found myself wanting more here, as I did with Part 4, the next section, which includes just two interviews about Owen Barfield. Salter acknowledges that Barfield is often given less attention than the members of the Inklings who are more well-known in literary circles, but it’s regrettable that this lack of attention is reflected in the book. The first interview here in this brief section is with Owen A. Barfield, the only grandson of Barfield and the current trustee of the Barfield literary estate; the memories he shares of his grandfather convey both the warmth and the deep wisdom of Barfield, while in the second interview Landon Loftin speaks articulately to Barfield’s philosophical insight, which had such an impact on both Lewis and Tolkien.
Part 5 includes four interviews about George MacDonald, which range from treating MacDonald in his own right to considering how he impacted the Inklings, particularly Lewis—though as Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson points out in her interview, MacDonald was part of Tolkien’s imaginative inheritance too, as he was for writers as diverse as Lucy Maud Montgomery, T.S. Eliot, Ursula LeGuin, Malcolm Guite, and Susanna Clarke. The interviewees here often orient their remarks around the theological vision MacDonald is known for articulating so memorably in his fiction; Trevor Hart recalls a time, however, when very few theologians paid attention to what MacDonald saw as a “hugely important aspect of what it is to be a human being in the world” (293), namely the nature and function of the imagination.
Part 6 is another long section, ending the collection with ten interviews: these feature scholars, friends, and acquaintances of William Lindsay Gresham, the first husband of Joy Gresham and a figure who is not often included in discussions of the Inklings or even of Inklings-adjacent figures. Because his best-known novel Nightmare Alley (1947) was recently adapted (again) into a film, directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro and starring blockbuster names such as Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, and Toni Collette, unsurprisingly many of the interviews in this section focus on Nightmare Alley. This section probably warrants its own book; it is a niche audience who would be interested in reading through these interviews, but for those who are curious to learn more about Gresham’s life and work, there is a lot here.
Throughout the collection, Salter consistently asks good questions of his interviewees, drawing on his experience as a journalist. He admits in the introduction to the book that it is “a strange beast: one part oral history, one part academic checklist, and one part journalistic coverage” (ix), and indeed, there is nothing else out there quite like this book. While some readers might wish for more follow-up questions at times, the interviews are not conducted as conversations; rather, Salter’s thoughtful questions provide an invitation for the different scholars to speak to aspects of their own research, to their knowledge of the different Inklings figures they have studied, and sometimes to their own writing (one of the delightful take-aways of reading this book is learning how many Inklings scholars are creative writers themselves). The result of Salter’s compilation here is a wide-ranging work, well worth reading, that testifies to the ever-growing, robust, and dynamic field of Inklings scholarship.
The Other Inklings: Interviews with Scholars on C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Inklings-Adjacent Figures by G. Connor Salter was published by Apocryphile Press in 2026.
Laura Van Dyke, PhD., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Trinity Western University, where she teaches twentieth-century and contemporary British and Canadian literature and helps to co-direct the Inklings Institute of Canada.