Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis

Joy Davidman spent her life searching for heaven on earth, and she found it just before her death from cancer at the age of 45, in her unlikely marriage to Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. Her last years and the aftermath of her death are well-known due to the popularity of the play and the movie

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Shadowlands. But Joy Davidman's story prior to her relationship with Lewis has never been told in full before Abigail Santamaria's biography Joy: Poet, Seeker and the Woman who Captivated C.S. Lewis.

Santamaria's portrait of Davidman reveals a restless woman whose life was characterized by contradictions and plagued by disappointments. She was a published poet, novelist, and freelance writer, a recipient of the Yale Younger Poets award, but she never earned enough through her writing to support her expensive tastes. As a young woman, she was a committed Communist and supporter of Stalin. Even after she became disillusioned with the Soviet way, she remained a dyed-in-the-wool atheist until her apprehension of a reality beyond the natural world led to her conversion to Christianity. But even after her baptism, she saw no conflict between her new faith and her interest in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Eventually she became disenchanted with Hubbard and his followers as well.

Santamaria reveals that Davidman was quite calculating in her approach to C.S. Lewis. Her first marriage was in serious trouble, and she had two young sons who needed her, but these concerns didn't impede her from traveling to England to meet the famous author. Davidman's and Lewis's marriage was at first one of convenience, but then it blossomed into true love. Interestingly, Lewis's literary friends, the Inklings, didn't like his new wife and could not understand what he saw in the dumpy, sarcastic, divorced Jewish-American convert.

Santamaria's biography of Davidman is insightful and wonderfully written. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

Please note that I received an electronic copy of this book to review from NetGalley, but I was not financially compensated in any way. The opinions expressed are my own and are based on my observations while reading this book.

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I have always been fascinated with who Joy was as a person. She swept Lewis off his feet, and looking at her before Lewis life it seems amazing that the two would hit it off. Some of her characteristics and her keen mind certainly predicted that some sparks would fly, but that they should fall so

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deeply in love seems more happenstance than logical conclusion. The one thing I thoroughly appreciated in this book was the very even-handed treatment of Joy's first marriage. I had previously uncritically accepted the views of Joy's first husband found in Shadowlands, i.e., that he was a tyrannical, physically abusive drunk. This book helped show that he was a much more complex person than that and that their marriage was equally as complicated. Just a very well done biography.

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The late-in-life romance of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman must be one of the most famous literary love stories of the 20th century. Lewis, a respected authority on Medieval and Renaissance literature and popular author of books about Christianity, and Davidman, a poet and novelist who was a former

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atheist, former Communist and former Jew who converted to Christianity, have been the subject of numerous books and even a notable film, “Shadowlands,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

Yet these accounts have generally been from the point of view of Lewis. We see how she impacted his life. One of the pleasures of “Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis” by Abigail Santamaria is that it reveals how he impacted her life.

Joy's parents were strict and unaffectionate. A less than perfect report card usually meant a slap in the face from her father. Throughout her youth she dreamed of Fairyland, a yearning very much like what Lewis describes in several of his books. She sought her Fairyland in her poetry, in the Communist Party and the Soviet Union (she once idolized Stalin much as she later idolized Lewis) and even in an early form of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology. She married a fellow Communist, Bill Gresham, also a writer, and they had two sons.

Reading books by C.S. Lewis and experiencing a profound religious experience when, still an atheist, she bowed in desperation to pray, her life was transformed. Bill changed, too, and together they joined a Presbyterian Church, both even becoming officers in the church. Bill was the more commercially successful writer of the pair, selling one of his novels to Hollywood, but he drank too much, once fired a rifle in their house while the boys slept and was sometimes unfaithful.

And then Joy began pursuing Lewis, as if he were her Fairyland. She wrote to him, Lewis responded and a long correspondence began. Then she left for England for several months, supposedly to do research for a book, although her real purpose was to meet Lewis and, if possible, win the heart of this contented bachelor who lived in Oxford with his brother. Despite the fact that her husband was alcoholic and attracted to other women, she left their children in the care of Bill and Renee, Joy's pretty cousin, a woman fleeing her own husband. When Bill and Renee fell in love, Joy portrayed it to Lewis as a betrayal, although Santamaria suggests it may have been her plan all along.

In time Joy took her boys to England, she and Bill divorced and she and Lewis were married twice, once in a civil ceremony and again in a Christian one.

Joy Davidman does not come through as a particularly admirable person even in her own biography, yet the author leaves no suggestion at the end that Lewis was ever deceived or taken advantage of. He loved Joy Davidman with all his heart and grieved deeply after her premature death from cancer. Imperfect though she may have been, she made his own imperfect life seem briefly like Fairyland.

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