What was the name of C.S. Lewis's wife, whom he married in 1956?

C.S. Lewis’s wife, whom he married in 1956, was Joy Davidman. She was an American writer and poet who became an important personal and intellectual presence in Lewis’s later life.

Lewis and Davidman first met in person in 1952 after corresponding for some time. They developed a close friendship, and Lewis later arranged a civil marriage to help her remain in the United Kingdom. They held a Christian wedding ceremony in 1957 at Oxford’s Church of England parish of Headington Quarry.

Their marriage was relatively brief because Davidman was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1960. Lewis’s reflections on her illness, death, and his own grief appeared in A Grief Observed, published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk.

A common mix-up is to treat A Grief Observed as a conventional biography of Davidman. It is instead an intensely personal record of Lewis’s changing emotions and questions after her death. The relationship also inspired later biographical and dramatic treatments.