Becoming Mrs. Lewis

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Becoming Mrs. Lewis is a work of historical fiction inspired by the life of Joy Davidman and her improbable love story with C. S. Lewis. The world’s fascination with Lewis (Jack to his friends) and his only wife, Helen Joy Davidman Gresham (Joy), has never abated. Their erosstory led to some of C. S. Lewis’s greatest works on love, grief, and faith, yet Joy is rarely offered credit as the muse, editor, best friend, and beloved wife she was to this revered author.

When I read A Grief Observed and felt Lewis’s palpable pain in losing the great love of his life, I wanted to know more about the woman he loved so fiercely.

You see, I fell into my own kind of love with Lewis when I was twelve years old and read The Screwtape Letters, years before I knew what the words satire or allegory meant. I read Lewis’s other works later in life with as much abandon and fascination. When I learned about Joy Davidman, I felt an odd kinship with her Lewis-adoration. Who was this woman? Who was this poet and novelist who had lived a world away from Lewis both culturally and literally and yet fallen in love with him?

A brilliant writer herself, Joy was a multi-award-winning poet, a novelist, a critic, a protégé of the MacDowell Colony, and much more. She graduated college at fifteen years old and received her master’s degree in fiction from Columbia. Her résumé is nearly as long as Lewis’s.

Everything about Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and author of Narnia living in England. She was a married woman who lived in upstate New York with her two young sons, and she was a converted Jew, former atheist, ex-Communist. On paper there was not a more impossible pairing. Everything blocked the way to love, but in the end it was not impossible at all.

With intense curiosity I began to read Joy’s work. Her poetry, essays, books, and letters flamed with talent, pain, and insight. She was a force of beautiful prose that many tried to squelch and inhibit. Then there were the conflicting narratives about her life—some complimentary and others outright unkind. Who was she really? A brash New Yorker who inserted herself into Lewis’s life or a brave and forthright woman of such brilliance that Jack loved and trusted her, while she also threatened the men and women who wanted to shove her into what they believed was her rightful place? This was a woman diverse, courageous, and complicated, and a woman whom C. S. Lewis loved with all of his being.

Joy often seemed not to care what others thought of her—but I did.

This work of fiction was meant not only to explore her life, work, and love affair, but also to delve into the challenges she faced as a woman in her time—or by any woman even now trying to live an authentic life while also caring for her family and pursuing her creative life, art, or passion. We are often woefully negligent of the women next to the men we admire, and Joy Davidman is one of those women.

There has been a shroud of mystery about what might or might not have occurred between Joy and Jack during the years of 1950–1956 (as all the letters between them have been destroyed). But some of that unknowing recently changed. In 2013, in a neglected corner of a closet belonging to Joy Davidman’s friend Jean Wakeman in Oxford, Joy’s son Douglas Gresham discovered a box of unpublished stories, essays, novellas, unfinished novels, and poems written by his mother. Inside this box was a sheaf of papers labeled Courage, which included forty-five love sonnets written by Joy Davidman and dedicated to C. S. Lewis. These poems and love sonnets were just released in 2015 (A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis, edited by Don W. King).

I had already read most of Lewis’s work by the time I was introduced to Joy, but during the writing of this novel, I reread many of my favorites with a new eye—seeing Joy’s influence on the prose and in the women who were Lewis’s characters. How had I not seen it all along? I wondered. Why do we not give credit to the women who inspired some of our favorite writers? I want the world, or at least you, the reader holding this book, to know of her influence on his works.

It was Joy’s friendship, intellect, writing, encouragement, and love that influenced most notably Till We Have Faces, Surprised by Joy, Reflections on the Psalms, and A Grief Observed. Many times she was both inspiration and co-author.

For me, C. S. Lewis was an Oxford don, a scholar and a poet, a Christian apologist and an imaginative genius, a master at prose and theme. He has been a man with theories and quotes that both inspire and infuriate me, and I was surprised to find that it was Joy’s life that brought Jack alive for me in a new way.

In this historical fiction, the letters and dialogue between Joy and Jack, as well as their family and friends, were created by my imagination. Although this is a work of fiction, my desire was to stay as close to the bone of the existing and factual skeleton as possible—thus the inspiration, occasional snippets, phrases, and quotes in the letters, in dialogue, and in Joy’s internal musings have come from actual events, letters, poems, essays, biographies, and articles written by and about them both, as well as speeches they gave.

As with any life, there are discrepancies within the many stories that have been written about both Jack and Joy; there are myths and assumptions that have been told and retold. I did my best to gather all of the information, compare it, and unravel it to tell a story that relates an emotional truth. This novel was written with the backbone of research and the work of those who have come before me, yet in fiction, imagination and inspiration must fill the gaps. I have attempted to capture Joy’s courage and fierce determination, as well as tap into the landscape of her heart.

I often felt like a detective digging through conflicting testimony and coming to my own conclusions as best I knew how on this side of their love story.

In the beginning of this journey, it was Joy’s early biographies I turned to, most notably And God Came In by Lyle Dorsett, Through the Shadowlands by Brian Sibley, Jack’s Life by Douglas Gresham, Lenten Lands by Douglas Gresham, and the biography Joy by Abigail Santamaria. The extensive critical work, articles, and edited collections by Don W. King, professor at Montreat College, brought me even closer to her life and work. Yet it was Joy’s own writings, poems, and letters that drew me nearer to her heart.

During the writing of this novel, I traveled to Wheaton College’s Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois, where most of Joy’s and Lewis’s papers are housed and carefully curated, along with a research collection of materials by and about six more renowned British authors. Joy’s (as of now) unpublished letters, poems, and personal papers were immaculately filed in numerous boxes—a treasure trove for a novelist. Alone in the Wade Center reading room, surrounded by Joy’s handwriting, her letters, her poems, her divorce decree and passport, Joy came alive for me.

This novel is written in a key of empathy for this extraordinary woman. I can only hope that I’ve captured some of her lionhearted courage, conflicted and sometimes disparaged choices, as well as her abiding love for the man we know as C. S. Lewis, but whom she knew as mentor, best friend, and in the end her lover and husband. The man she knew as Jack.

I could not have come to know her as I have (and it is only an imagining of the heart, not a scholarly attempt to dissect her work or her actions) without the insightful, dedicated work of so many others. In addition to the works mentioned above, I found the following texts to be useful in my own research and strongly recommend them for further study and insight.