Which actress and writer did C.S. Lewis marry in 1956?

C.S. Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman in 1956.

Davidman was born in New York City in 1915 and became known as a poet, novelist, and essayist. She and Lewis first became friends through correspondence and met in person after she moved to England. Their civil marriage took place in April 1956, primarily to resolve immigration and legal difficulties.

The couple later received a Christian marriage ceremony at Oxford’s Church of St Mary the Virgin in March 1957. Their relationship became the subject of Lewis’s A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk after Davidman’s death from cancer in 1960.

Davidman is sometimes remembered only through the film Shadowlands, but she had an established literary career of her own. Lewis’s marriage to her was his only marriage, and their relationship influenced his later reflections on love, suffering, and grief.