Who was C.S. Lewis’s wife at the time of their 1956 marriage?

C.S. Lewis married Joy Davidman in 1956.

Davidman was an American poet and writer born Helen Joy Davidman. Lewis and Davidman first met through correspondence after becoming acquainted with each other’s writing. They married in a civil ceremony at Oxford in April 1956, primarily so that Davidman could remain in the United Kingdom.

Their relationship later became a Christian marriage ceremony in 1957, conducted by the Reverend Peter Bide at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Lewis’s account of their marriage and her illness appears in A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk.

Davidman died of cancer in 1960. Their marriage and her death profoundly affected Lewis’s later writing. The film Shadowlands dramatized their relationship, but the real chronology and details come from biographies, letters, and Lewis’s own reflections.