In The Last Battle, the final Narnia book, the following passage famously appears:

“Sir,” said Tirian[…] “[…] Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?”

“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”

“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”

“Oh Susan!” said Jill, “she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

The question of how to interpret that passage has led to decades’ worth of commentary and argument. The phrase “The Problem of Susan” refers broadly to that controversy—questions like whether Lewis was being sexist, whether he was saying that female sexuality excludes women from heaven, what else he might have been implying, what other ways we can think about Susan’s absence from Narnia in that sequence, and so on.

This page attempts to provide some links to some relevant works and discussion.

This page does not attempt to be a complete list of Problem of Susan resources. I suspect there are at least thousands of discussions about these issues, maybe millions. I’m not going to try to list them all here.

But when the topic comes up, I often find myself reaching for a resource list that doesn’t (as far as I know) exist, so I figured I could make one.

Content warning for inclusion of a story by Neil Gaiman.

Narnia Character Ages

This is only tangentially relevant, but I feel like it’s useful background for the rest of the discussions. In particular: Susan was 12 at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; she grew to age 27 in Narnia, then reverted to 12 on return to Earth; she was 21 at the time of her family’s deaths in The Last Battle.

Quotes from C.S. Lewis’s letters

A 2021 blog post that quotes a couple of letters from Lewis to fans, including this line from a 1955 letter: “The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having been turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end—in her own way.”

“The Problem of Susan,” by Neil Gaiman (2004)

Short fiction. I loved this story when I first read it, but that was a long time ago, and I don’t think I had thought about the issue before that, and that was long before I knew about the problems with Gaiman. But I think it’s a big enough milestone in Problem-of-Susan studies that it would feel weird to me to leave it out.

“Lipstick on My Scholar,” by Andrew Rilstone (2005)

Blog post discussing various aspects of the Problem of Susan; among other things, it argues against Philip Pullman’s and J.K. Rowling’s complaints about Lewis’s handling of Susan, and it covers aspects of what Lewis said elsewhere about heaven and hell.

Comments on my 2005 review of the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

The comments on that post feature extensive debate (mostly among friends of mine) about the Problem of Susan.

“Susan, Problems of,” by Ana Mardoll (2012)

The first post in a series of posts that comprise a close reading of Prince Caspian; this post includes some discussion of the Problem of Susan. (Part of a longer series of 150+ posts about the Narnia books, written over a ten-year period.) See also Mardoll’s disentangling of some aspects of the Problem of Susan and further comments.

“Elegant and Fine,” by Ursula Vernon (2012)

Short fiction. “The real problem with Susan, in the end, was not that she was no longer Narnia’s friend. It was that she had already been its lover.”

“Can we talk about Susan’s fabulous adventures after Narnia?” by ink-splotch (2013)

Short fiction, exploring Susan’s later life, including connections with US postwar history. Companion piece: “Can we talk about Susan Pevensie for a moment?” (2014).

“Solutions to the Problem of Susan: Reading Susan Fic,” by Janet Lafler (2015)

Essay about Problem-of-Susan fanfic. Link is to the book it was published in: The WisCon Chronicles (Vol 9): Intersections and Alliances, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj.

“Susan Pevensie,” by LeesMyth (2019)

A blog post looking mostly at some relevant things that Lewis wrote in some of his other work.

“The Problem(s) of Susan,” by Matt Mikalatos (2021)

Discussion of what Lewis may have meant, including a lovely brief piece of fix-it fic in which Lucy talks with Aslan about Susan. (This post is one installment of a 60-part series of posts titled “The Great C.S. Lewis Reread,” by Matt Mikalatos, published from 2019 through 2022. Mikalatos is explicitly approaching Lewis from a progressive Christian perspective; he both praises and criticizes Lewis at various times.)

Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction, by Octavia Cade (2026)

Forthcoming nonfiction book; a study of Problem-of-Susan fanfic.