Who was C.S. Lewis’s wife from their 1956 civil marriage until her death?

Joy Davidman was C.S. Lewis’s wife from their 1956 civil marriage until her death. Davidman was an American writer and poet who had converted to Christianity before meeting Lewis and moving to England.

Lewis and Davidman initially entered a civil marriage so that she could remain in the United Kingdom. A Christian marriage ceremony followed in 1957 at Oxford’s Church of England parish of Holy Trinity, Headington, after Lewis’s friend Peter Bide officiated. Their relationship became deeply important to Lewis.

Davidman was diagnosed with cancer, and she died in 1960. Lewis later described the experience of grief in A Grief Observed, which was first published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The book is not a conventional biography of Davidman, but it records Lewis’s emotional and theological struggle after her death.