I’ve always thought of the adjective “homely” as meaning “plain”—not quite ugly, but not very pretty. In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis uses it in a much different way. It is a favorite word of his friend Arthur’s, who means by it “the rooted quality which attaches [things] to all our simple experiences…” Lewis describes Arthur as getting “endless enjoyment out of the first sentence of Jane Eyre [“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”], or that other opening sentence in one of Hans Andersen’s stories, ‘How it did rain, to be sure.’”
Later, still of Arthur: “…in his search for the Homely he taught me to see other things as well. But for him I should never have known the beauty of the ordinary vegetables that were destined to the pot. “Drills,” he used to say, “Just ordinary drills of cabbages—what can be better?” And he was right. Often he recalled my eyes from the horizon just to look through a hole in a hedge, to see nothing more than a farmyard in its mid-morning solitude, and perhaps a gray cat squeezing its way under a barn door, or a bent old woman with a wrinkled, motherly face coming back with an empty bucket from a pigsty.”