Who was C.S. Lewis’s wife, the American writer whose life inspired Shadowlands?

C.S. Lewis’s wife was Joy Davidman, an American writer and poet.

Davidman and Lewis first met through correspondence and became close friends. They married in a civil ceremony in 1956 so that she could remain in the United Kingdom. Their relationship deepened, and they later received a Christian marriage ceremony at Oxford’s Church of England parish, Holy Trinity Church, Headington, in 1957.

Davidman was diagnosed with cancer, and the couple’s short marriage became the subject of Lewis’s A Grief Observed. He initially published that book under a pseudonym because of its intensely personal treatment of bereavement. Davidman died in 1960, only a few years after their marriage ceremony.

Her life with Lewis inspired the stage play and films titled Shadowlands. The story is often simplified into a romance between an English professor and an American writer, but Davidman was herself an established author, with published poetry and fiction before meeting Lewis.