Joy Davidman

July 2025 marked the 65th anniversary of the passing of Helen Joy Davidman, the remarkable poet, novelist, and, in the latter stages of their lives, wife of C. S. Lewis.

Born on 18 April 1915 in New York City, to Jewish parents from eastern Europe, Joy demonstrated exceptional literary talent from an early age. She earned her MA in English Literature from Columbia University by age 20 and soon launched her writing career with distinction. Her debut collection of poetry, Letter to a Comrade, earned her the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1938 and the Russell Loines Award the following year. Before long, Joy was publishing novels, reviewing films for the Communist newsletter New Masses, and editing poetry. She even worked, unsuccessfully, as a screenwriter for MGM for a short period.

Raised in a secular Jewish household, Joy’s early beliefs skewed firmly toward atheism. She even joined the Communist Party in the late 1930s. Yet persisting questions about meaning and purpose, coupled with having to write reviews of books and films for New Masses based on political ideology, with no regard to literary or artistic merit, and her own turbulent marriage to writer William Lindsay Gresham (author of Nightmare Alley, which spawned two Hollywood movies), who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, led her toward spiritual exploration, including Scientology, Judaism, and Christianity.

A turning point came in the mid-1940s. Reading C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce awakened a spiritual hunger. A crisis involving her first husband led her to despair and then to surrender her atheistic certainties and embrace a search for deeper truths. She later described God’s presence as breaking through her defences. Ultimately, she recognised in Christianity a depth and clarity that she thought was unmatched by any other faith she investigated.

In January 1950, Joy wrote to Lewis in Oxford, initiating a correspondence that convinced Joy that she should leave her two children with her cousin and travel to England and get to know him. Joy travelled to Oxford in 1952 and managed to persuade Lewis to meet her and her friend. Lewis brought his brother Warren and surprisingly (and presumably with some prompting from her) invited joy to stay at their house, the Kilns, over Christmas. The evidence from her poetry over this period shows that she was determined to develop a romantic relationship with Lewis, but that he showed no interest. He even indicated to a friend that the extension of her visit at the Kilns was distressing for him.

Joy went back to New York, where her husband had developed a romantic relationship with her cousin, and decided to return to England with her two boys, David and Douglas, in 1953. They initially lived in London, and with Lewis’s help, put the two boys into a boarding school. She again persuaded Lewis to invite them to the Kilns during the school holidays. Her poetry indicates that she continued to try and turn the intellectual relationship they had into a romantic one, but to no avail. Lewis was not interested. She moved to Oxford, much further away from her sons’ school.

Their intellectual relationship did continue to develop: Joy commented on drafts of books Lewis was writing, and indexed one of his brother Warnie’s books. He in turn provided feedback on the draft of Smoke on the Mountain—An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments, and wrote the preface for publication in 1954, the same year that Lewis became a professor at Cambridge, although maintained his house in Oxford.

In 1956, Joy informed Lewis that she and her boys were going to be deported back to her ‘violent husband’ because the UK authorities would not renew her visa. Without a hint of any romantic relationship, Lewis agreed to marry her quietly in a registry office in Oxford, enabling her to live permanently in England. That afternoon he was lecturing again in Cambridge.

Sadly, Joy’s life was soon overshadowed by tragedy. Diagnosed with terminal bone cancer shortly after their civil wedding, her health rapidly declined. In March 1957, with her dying wish to be formally married in the eyes of the Church, Lewis arranged a second ceremony, at her hospital bedside—this time consecrated by a priest, albeit without the bishop’s approval (Joy was divorced).

Joy’s cancer soon seemed to go into remission. What followed were three years of increasingly deep companionship. Together, they travelled to Ireland, staying in the Crawfordsburn Inn and visiting Donegal. They also had a holiday together with friends in Greece, despite her poor health and mobility. Their relationship seems to have developed into a profound intimacy that blossomed despite Joy’s illness “It’s funny having at 59 the sort of happiness most men have in the twenties,” Lewis wrote.

On July 13, 1960, Joy passed away in Oxford, aged 45. Her ashes were scattered in the rose garden at the crematorium. Overcome by grief, Lewis published A Grief Observed in 1961 under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk—a stark, unflinching memoir of love and loss. His anguish and questioning of faith touched millions. He was left with responsibility of her two children, until he died three years later.

Joy’s story entered mainstream imagination through “Shadowlands”—first a BBC television play in 1985, then a stage play in 1989–90, and finally the acclaimed, if romanticised, 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. The film emotionally captures Joy’s vibrancy and the bond that reshaped Lewis’s life and faith, although ignoring Lewis’s Belfast roots, the fact she had two children (not one), and that until she became ill, Lewis had no interest in a romantic relationship with her, despite her pressure to do so.

Joy Davidman’s life should not be reduced to just three years as Lewis’s wife: she was a gifted poet, novelist and religious writer in her own right. She was Lewis’s equal, and challenged and supported him both intellectually and spiritually, and gave him, probably, the deepest emotional connection of his life. Lewis described her in A Grief Observed as “a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword”.

For anyone who wants to explore her life and work further, there are two useful biographies by Abigail Santamaria (2022) and Lyle W. Dorsett (1983). Don W King has also done invaluable work in collecting and publishing her letters (2009), and her poems (2015).