The Great Divorce is a work of Christian fiction by C. S. Lewis, written in response to William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Lewis' opinion, such a marriage was impossible.

The Great Divorce was first printed as a serial in a religious publication called The Guardian (not connected in any way to the British newspaper of the same name). The first chapter was printed in the November 10, 1944 issue, and continued through the April 13, 1945 issue, under the title Who Goes Home? or The Grand Divorce. The Great Divorce was printed in book form soon after.

In The Great Divorce, the narrator (Lewis himself) dreams that he is in a grim and gloomy town (a depiction of Hell or purgatory for those leave it). He finds a bus for people who wish to see Heaven, gets on, and converses with some of the other people on the bus. The bus eventually reaches paradise, and the people on the bus realise that they are ghosts, and every feature of the landscape (including drops of water and blades of grass) causes them immense pain.

Shining people come to meet those from the town, and try to persuade them to repent and enter Heaven proper. Most of the ghosts refuse, giving various reasons and excuses. None of the ghosts realise that they have been in Hell.

The narrator is met by George MacDonald. MacDonald explains that it is possible for a soul to remain in Heaven having been in the town; for such souls, their time in the town has been purgatory, and the goodness of Heaven works backwards into their time in the town. Conversely, the evil of Hell works backwards so that if a soul remains in the town, their time on Earth is turned to badness. According to MacDonald, Heaven and Hell cannot coexist in a single soul, and while it is possible to leave Hell and enter Heaven, doing so implies turning away (repentance).

Literary Influences

Lewis consciously draws elements of the plot from Dante's The Divine Comedy, comparing his meeting with MacDonald to "the first sight of Beatrice." He also credits a "scientifiction" (science fiction) story of unknown title and authorship with the idea for an "extrasolid" world. Where the original work used it to embody an unchangable past, Lewis uses it to show the permanence and strength of the divine world compared to earth or Hell. He also credits the idea that Hell exists within Heaven but is "smaller than one atom" of it to his scientifiction readings; travel by shrinking or enlargement is a common theme in speculative fiction, and the narrator alludes to its presence in Alice in Wonderland.