Life & Wisdom Quote by Tanith Lee

At 17, influence isn’t a bookshelf fact; it’s a kind of private ignition. Tanith Lee’s casual-seeming nod to C.S. Lewis quietly sketches the blueprint of a young writer taking on permission: permission to build worlds, to argue with metaphysics through story, to treat imagination as something sturdier than escapism. Lewis isn’t just a stylistic model here. He’s a signal that Lee’s early formation happened at the crossroads of myth, moral architecture, and the seductive idea that fantasy can smuggle big questions past the defenses of “serious” culture.

The phrasing does sly work. “The other writer” implies a lineage already in motion, an apprenticeship made of multiple magnets. It also positions Lewis as formative without turning him into a saint; Lee isn’t pledging allegiance so much as marking a gravitational pull. Saying “about 17” matters too: it’s the age when taste hardens into identity and when books become contraband maps out of whatever life you’ve been assigned. Lewis, for a reader that age, offers the thrill of threshold-crossing and the reassurance of structure - a cosmos with rules, even when it’s populated by talking beasts and half-lit forests.

There’s subtextual tension, too, given Lee’s later reputation for luxuriant darkness, sensuality, and moral ambiguity. Citing Lewis hints at a productive friction: she may have inherited his clarity of purpose while pushing against his theological certainties, taking the machinery of allegory and refitting it for stranger, more adult enchantments. Influence here reads less like imitation than like an early key turned in a lock.