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

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HMH, Aug 4, 2015 - Biography & Autobiography - 416 pages
“A lush Narnia tale for grownups”: The first comprehensive biography of the rebel thinker who married C. S. Lewis (Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize winner).
 
If Joy Davidman is known at all, it’s as the wife of C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia. On her own, she was a poet and radical, a contributor to the communist journal New Masses, and an active member of New York literary circles of the 1930s and ’40s. Growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, she became an atheist, then a practitioner of Dianetics, and finally a Christian convert after experiencing a moment of transcendent grace. She was also a mother, a novelist, a screenwriter, and an intelligent, difficult, and determined woman. In 1952 she set off for England to pursue C. S. Lewis, the man she considered her spiritual guide and her intellectual mentor.
Out of a deep friendship grounded in faith, poetry, and a passion for writing grew a timeless love story, and an unforgettable marriage of equals—one that would be immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis’s memoir, A Grief Observed.
“Plumbing the depths of unpublished documents, Santamaria reveals the vision and writing of a young woman whose coming of age in the turbulent thirties is both distinctive and emblematic of her time” (Susan Hertog, author of Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life). Finally, Joy Davidman is brought out of her husband’s shadow to secure a place in literary history that is both a long-time coming and well-deserved.
 
“This book gives Davidman her life back. . . . Ms. Santamaria succeeds in de-mythologizing Davidman’s story.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Compelling . . . clear, unsentimental.” — The New York Times Book Review 
 

Contents

1 18921930
1
2 19301934
24
3 19341938
44
4 19381939
68
5 JuneDecember 1939
93
6 19391942
107
7 19421944
129
8 19441946
148
11 August 1952January 1953
224
12 January November 1953
249
13 November 1953April 1954
258
14 Fall 1954October 1956
282
15 Fall 1956Fall 1957
304
16 19581960
324
Back Matter
341
Back Flap
415

Photographs
174
9 19461950
175
10 19501952
204
Back Cover
416
Spine
417
Copyright

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About the author (2015)

Abigail Santamaria earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Jentel Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in New York City with her family. Joy is her first book.

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