Who was C.S. Lewis's wife when he married in 1956?

Joy Davidman was C.S. Lewis’s wife when they married in 1956.

Davidman was an American writer and poet who became a close friend of Lewis before their marriage. The couple entered a civil marriage in 1956, primarily to address legal and practical circumstances. In 1957, an Anglican marriage ceremony was conducted by Lewis’s friend Peter Bide after Lewis’s church initially refused to marry them.

Their relationship became the subject of later biographies, plays, and films, including Shadowlands. Davidman’s illness with cancer brought a difficult period into their marriage, but Lewis wrote about love, grief, and faith after her death in A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under a pseudonym.

Davidman died in 1960. Lewis survived her by three years and died in 1963. She is sometimes described only as a literary inspiration, but she was also an accomplished author in her own right, with published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.