Joy Davidman

Life

Joy Davidman was born on April 18, 1915, in New York City. She grew up in a Jewish family and was considered a child prodigy because of her exceptional abilities. In 1935, at the age of twenty, she received a master's degree in English literature from Columbia University. In her youth she was an atheist and is known to have taken part in the Communist movement.

In 1942 she married the writer William Lindsay Gresham, with whom she had two sons, David and Douglas. During this marriage she underwent conversion to Christianity; she reportedly said that her conversion was prompted by a sudden awareness of God's presence. Around the time of her conversion she read books by C. S. Lewis, and after corresponding with him she is said to have traveled to England to meet him in person. She and Gresham divorced in 1954.

In 1956 she married Lewis. At first the marriage was only a civil one, contracted so that she could obtain the right to remain in England; after she was diagnosed with cancer, the couple reportedly held a church wedding at her bedside. After battling the disease, she died in Oxford on July 13, 1960.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Poet: Her poetry collection Letter to a Comrade won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1938 and the Russell Loines Award for Poetry in 1939.
• Religious writing: Her best-known religious work is Smoke on the Mountain, a book that interprets the Ten Commandments in light of modern life. Lewis is said to have written its foreword.
• Influence on Lewis: After her death, Lewis collected the writings he produced while enduring his grief and published them as A Grief Observed. Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces is also known to have been dedicated to her. Recent scholarship has been reexamining her influence on Lewis's later works.

Influence on the Korean Church

There is little evidence of any direct influence on the Korean church. However, as Lewis's A Grief Observed was translated into Korean and read by members of many denominations as one of the devotional books on comfort and mourning, her name also became widely known. The film Shadowlands (1993), which portrays the story of the two, also helped make her known.

Assessment

Because she was an intellectual who became a Christian after having been a Jewish atheist and Communist, her conversion is frequently discussed, together with Lewis, as an episode in the twentieth-century history of Christian thought. Although she was long remembered only as "Lewis's wife," there has recently been a movement to evaluate her accomplishments as a poet and writer in their own right.

It is also reported that the remarriage of a divorced person to a lay member of the church could have been controversial within the Church of England at the time, and that some of the people around Lewis did not welcome the marriage. Views on this matter vary according to each denomination's understanding of divorce and remarriage.