The Major & the Missionary
What’s new? I’ve just published a book about C. S. Lewis’s brother, Warren Lewis, published by Rabbit Room Press. It highlights his friendship with a medical missionary named Blanche Biggs. There will be an audiobook, print book and eBook, and a stage play. It’s called The Major and the Missionary.
The very first public performance of The Major and the Missionary: A Love Story featured Diana Glyer and Michael Ward doing a simple table read at an Inklings conference in Oklahoma.
What is The Major & the Missionary?
Well, it’s a bunch of letters, actual letters, written by Warren Hamilton Lewis and Dr. Blanche Biggs during the 1960s and 1970s. Order now: click HERE
As these thoughtful, articulate letters flew back and forth from Papua New Guinea to Oxford and back again, two strangers became penpals, then confidants, and then, well, affectionate friends.
Their letters make wonderful reading, and their story will touch your heart.
The Major and the Missionary is an important source of information about C. S. Lewis and his brother, Major Warren Lewis. But I am hoping that this collection of 87 letters will somehow reach the hearts of Christian missionaries and those who believe in their work. Dr. Lucy Blanche Biggs (1909-2008) grew up in Tasmania and felt the call to missionary service after God miraculously healed her of tuberculosis. She served as a doctor and hospital administrator in Papua New Guinea from 1948-1974. She received an OBE from the Queen on 1 January 1975 in recognition of her accomplishments. In this correspondence with Warren Lewis, she is articulate and remarkably frank about the joys and challenges of mission work. One of the main reasons I have worked so hard to bring this project to print is the way her life has inspired mine.
After the death of his brother, Warren Lewis lived at The Kilns in Oxford, spent time with friends, edited his famous brother’s letters, and did a little writing of his own. Then, out of the blue, he got a letter from a stranger on the far side of the world. Over the years that followed, he and Blanche Biggs, a missionary in Papua New Guinea, shared a vibrant correspondence. These conversations encompassed their views on faith, their politics, their humor, the legacy of C. S. Lewis, and their own trials and longings. Taken as a whole, these collected letters paint a colorful portrait that illuminates not only the particulars of distant times and places but the intimate contours of a rare friendship. Edited and introduced by Bandersnatch author Diana Pavlac Glyer, Rabbit Room Press is proud to be publishing this collection in September 2023.
