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

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

Lewis and the American writer Joy Davidman were married in a civil ceremony at Oxford Register Office on 23 April 1956. Davidman had moved to England with her two sons, Douglas and David, and her relationship with Lewis developed through their correspondence and friendship. The civil marriage initially helped her obtain legal residency in Britain.

They later received a Christian marriage ceremony at the Church of England parish church of Headington Quarry in March 1957, when Lewis’s friend Peter Bide officiated. Their relationship became widely known after Davidman’s illness and death, and Lewis’s reflections on grief were published after his death as A Grief Observed. She died of cancer in 1960. Davidman is sometimes identified only as Lewis’s literary correspondent, but she was also his spouse during the final years of his life.