I have just completed reading a most excellent biography of Lewis entitled
The Narnian by Alan Jacobs. Within a section in which Jacobs attempts to address Lewis's perceived misogyny, he addresses this exact point (any typos are my own transcription errors):
Quote:
Most troubling to many readers is what the American writer Neil Gaiman has called "the problem of Susan"...The problem is that, as we are told in The Last Battle, Susan is "no longer a friend of Narnia" -- she does not appear with her brothers and sisters when they return to Narnia, that is, the Real Narnia, Narnia remade. According to Jill, "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations." For the gifted children's writer and fantasy novelist Philip Pullman, the meaning of this is all too plain: Susan has undergone puberty, and her sexual maturation is "so dreadful and so redolent of sin that [Lewis] had to send her to Hell." But this is nonsense on several counts. First, it is clearly not sexuality that is Susan's problem but rather an excessive regard for social acceptance: she wants to be "grown-up" because she is at an age when being grown-up is the greatest possible good and being childish the worst possible crime. Susan has been distracted from Narnia not by sexual desire but by the desire to be within the Inner Ring. (As Lewis had written years earlier, some young people pursue their first sexual experience less because they want sex itself, -- that prospect can be as frightening as it is desireable -- than because they want the social acceptance that sexual experience can bring.)
More important, Susan cannot have been "sent to Hell" because she has not died -- something Pullman could have easily discovered if he had been concerned with the truth of his accusation against Lewis. in 1957 a boy had writen to Lewis with some conren for the fate of Susan, and here is the reply her received: "The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having turned into a rahter sill, 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."
~~ pp. 259-260
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I can add nothing to that. Jacobs has written quite an interesting bio of Lewis, and I recommend it highly.