Becoming Mrs. Lewis: The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis

Joy Davidman’s career as a writer was consistently overshadowed by her first husband, William Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley commands respect and fame as an example of noir fiction. After divorcing Bill, Joy married celebrated medievalist and early modernist C. S. Lewis. Davidman again languished outside the spotlight given to her more famous husband. Her work spans several decades and demonstrates mastery of formal elements, whether prose or poetry. These works include magazine articles, poems, and book-length works such as Weeping Bay and Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Her Letter to a Comrade, a collection of poems published in 1938, placed first in the Yale Younger Poet competition and was awarded the Russell Loines Memorial Award for poetry. In 2013, much of Davidman’s work was gifted to her son Douglas from one of Davidman’s friends in England (394). These papers are now housed at Wheaton College.

As a narrator, Joy mentions much of her own output, which remains largely unknown compared to the work of her two husbands. Despite her relative obscurity now, Becoming Mrs. Lewis demonstrates that Davidman remains her husbands’ peer. Davidman’s balancing of domestic duties and her authorial identity serve as one of the major concerns of the novel.