Jonathan Poletti
1 min readJan 24, 2022

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The bit about Coghill is in Harry Lee Poe's 2021 biography The Making of C.S. Lewis (1918–1945):

"Within ten days of their first meeting, Jack had spent a good deal of time with Coghill and had learned that he agreed with his view 'that women were bores until they were forty.' What Lewis did not know, nor perhaps Coghill, was that Coghill would live quietly as a homosexual the rest of his life after first marrying, fathering a child, and obtaining a divorce."

It's fascinating to return to previous descriptions of him to see them as queer-coded. The book C.S. Lewis and His Circle, has a portrait of Coghill by a former student named John Wain.

"He was interested in theatre and music; many of his friends were from that world, and he was a man who naturally moved in a wider world. He knew the major continental cities. He travelled about and saw the masterpieces of architecture and painting, and he went to the great opera houses as naturally as he breathed."

"Nevill had a natural grace. It was a beautiful quality of gentleness and humour and kindliness and hospitality, and he was very, very easy to get along with, but he wasn't a pushover, I mean he wasn't flaccid. If you said something that contradicted one of his dearly held convictions he would come back at you, but he was always in every way courteous…"

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