Which woman became the subject of C.S. Lewis’s 1956 book A Grief Observed?

Joy Davidman became the subject of C.S. Lewis’s 1956 book A Grief Observed.

A Grief Observed records Lewis’s reflections after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, from cancer. The book was published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, partly because Lewis wanted readers to encounter the emotional and spiritual argument without immediately identifying him as the author.

The work presents grief as disorienting and intellectually challenging. Lewis questions familiar ideas about suffering, prayer, and God, rather than offering a simple or orderly account of bereavement. After his identity became known, the book was widely read as an unusually direct record of mourning.

Davidman was an American writer whom Lewis married in 1956. Their Christian marriage ceremony followed in 1957, and she died in 1960. A Grief Observed is therefore distinct from Lewis’s earlier theological books: it is a personal meditation shaped by a specific loss.