What is the name of C.S. Lewis’s wife who died of cancer in 1960?

Joy Davidman was C.S. Lewis’s wife who died of cancer in 1960. She was an American writer and poet whom Lewis first came to know through correspondence and friendship.

Davidman and Lewis married in a civil ceremony in 1956. Their relationship later received a Christian marriage ceremony, and their life together became the subject of biographies, memoirs, and the film Shadowlands.

Davidman’s illness and death deeply affected Lewis. He explored grief, faith, anger, and doubt in A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The book is often read alongside accounts of their marriage, but it does not present grief as a simple or tidy process.

Joy Davidman is sometimes confused with fictional characters or with Lewis’s earlier friendships. She was a real American author, born in 1915, and her marriage to Lewis lasted only a few years before her death.