Which C.S. Lewis book examines grief after his wife’s death under a pseudonym?

A Grief Observed examines grief after Joy Davidman’s death.

A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis’s 1961 book about bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis first published it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, partly to protect his privacy and to prevent readers from treating the book as a straightforward autobiographical statement.

The short work takes the form of frank reflections on mourning, prayer, anger, doubt, memory, and the difficulty of reconciling suffering with belief in a loving God. Its direct style differs from Lewis’s more deliberately instructional apologetic books. After Lewis’s death, the author’s identity became widely known, and later editions were published under his own name.

The book is sometimes confused with Surprised by Joy, Lewis’s 1955 autobiography, which covers his intellectual and spiritual development before his marriage. A Grief Observed instead focuses on the emotional and theological experience of loss after Davidman died from cancer in 1960.