Who did C.S. Lewis marry in a civil ceremony in 1956?

C.S. Lewis married Joy Davidman in a civil ceremony in 1956.

Joy Davidman was an American writer and poet who had become an important correspondent and friend of Lewis. They married at the Oxford Register Office on 23 April 1956. The civil marriage initially helped Davidman secure the legal right to remain in the United Kingdom.

The couple later received a Christian marriage ceremony in 1957 at Holy Trinity Church, Headington, conducted by Lewis’s friend Peter Bide. Their relationship became one of the best-known personal chapters in Lewis’s biography and was later portrayed in the film Shadowlands.

Davidman had two sons, David and Douglas, from her earlier marriage. Lewis’s relationship with her is sometimes reduced to its screen adaptations, but their letters and shared intellectual life are also significant parts of the historical record.