Which poet and author married C.S. Lewis in 1956?

Joy Davidman married C.S. Lewis in 1956. The American poet and writer entered a civil marriage with Lewis at Oxford Register Office on 23 April 1956.

Davidman was born in 1915 in New York City and had already published poetry, novels, and other writing before meeting Lewis. Their relationship developed through correspondence and friendship. Lewis later described the marriage as a profound partnership, and the couple held a Christian marriage ceremony in March 1957 at the Church of England parish church in Headington Quarry.

Davidman was diagnosed with cancer, and she and Lewis had only a few years together before her death in 1960. Lewis’s account of grief, A Grief Observed, was published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk and is widely connected with the experience of losing her.

Davidman is sometimes confused with Lewis’s longtime household friend and caretaker, Major Warren Lewis, who was his brother, not a spouse. Joy Davidman was Lewis’s wife and a published author in her own right.