Since Joy Davidman is known to most readers as the woman
C.S. Lewis married late in life and lost to cancer four years after that
marriage, it is likely that many readers will pick up Joy Davidman’s letters
out of fondness for her husband’s Narnia stories or popular theology. They will quickly find that the letters
chronicle a life of considerable interest in itself. Davidman was an award-winning writer herself,
a secular Jew and atheist who turned hopefully to communism and then
wholeheartedly to Christianity in her later years, though remaining
skeptical—and acerbic—about church people.
The fact that she remained friends with her first husband after their difficult
marriage broke up resulted in many of the letters in the collection, which
include material Lewis fans will be glad to see, though it offers little
intimate information about their lives except that they were devoted to one
another through her painful final years with breast cancer. Her account of that last illness is often
matter-of-fact; she writes as though it is one of the less interesting parts of
her life, which was full of intellectual pursuits, including editing some of
Lewis’s later works, and of practical concerns that included caring for her two
boys with whom she emigrated to England from New York.
