C.S. Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman in 1956.
Their relationship began as a close friendship conducted partly through letters. Davidman, a poet and novelist who had moved to England, became an important intellectual companion to Lewis. They had a civil marriage ceremony at Oxford Register Office on 23 April 1956.
The marriage was initially kept private from many of Lewis’s friends. Lewis later sought a Christian marriage ceremony after Davidman was diagnosed with cancer. The ceremony took place in March 1957 at the Church of England parish church in Headington Quarry, Oxford, and was conducted by his friend and fellow writer Peter Bide.
Davidman died in 1960. Lewis’s later reflections on bereavement are associated with A Grief Observed, although he published it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The book is not a conventional biography of their marriage, but it records his response to her death.