What was the name of C.S. Lewis’s wife who inspired A Grief Observed?

Joy Davidman was C.S. Lewis’s wife and inspired A Grief Observed.

Joy Davidman and Lewis married in a civil ceremony in 1956. She had been an American writer and poet, and their relationship developed through correspondence and friendship before their marriage. They later had a Christian marriage ceremony at Oxford’s Church of St Mary the Virgin.

Davidman was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1960. Lewis’s short book A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, records his raw reflections on bereavement, doubt, anger, and memory. The book is personal rather than a conventional biography of Davidman.

Some readers confuse Davidman with Lewis’s literary friends or with fictional characters from his books. She was a real person, an author in her own right, and the central personal loss behind A Grief Observed.