Who was C.S. Lewis’s wife in his 1956 civil marriage?

Joy Davidman was C.S. Lewis’s wife in his 1956 civil marriage.

Lewis and the American writer Joy Davidman Gresham entered a civil marriage in Oxford in 1956. Their relationship had begun as a friendship and correspondence, and the civil ceremony initially helped Davidman secure the right to remain in the United Kingdom. Lewis later came to regard their relationship as a true marriage.

An Anglican religious ceremony followed in 1957 at the Church of England, conducted by Lewis’s friend Peter Bide. The couple had only a few years together because Davidman died of cancer in 1960. Lewis later reflected on grief and faith in A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk.

Davidman was a writer in her own right and had previously been married to William Lindsay Gresham. She had two sons, Douglas and David. Biographical accounts sometimes call the 1956 event a wedding without distinguishing the civil ceremony from the later church ceremony.