The New York Times Reviews Biography of Joy Davidman: Sneaky Poet and Love of C.S. Lewis

Joy Davidman's pursuit of the "famously sensitive, witty writer" ended with her marriage—to C.S. Lewis—at the age of 41. While The Times writes that her life was "dreary and unremarkable" she did create some excitement for herself ghostwriting Russian and English poetry (she was from the Bronx) for an anthology of international verse. As her biography, Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis, points out, these were one of many elaborate sidelines. More:

Even if “Joy,” Abigail Santamaria’s life of C.S. Lewis’s wife, were a bad book, Lewis’s zealous admirers would read it, eager for another way to finger his shroud. Joy Davidman married Lewis, author of the beloved “Chronicles of Narnia,” at 41, and her late entrance into his bachelor existence is a cherished part of his legend. She soon died of bone cancer, but she had made him a husband and stepfather, adding an intimate touch to the genial but distant self-portrait that emerges from his grown-up books, tracts like “Mere Christianity.” Her death was also the subject of “A Grief Observed,” his classic book on mourning and how faith can survive it.

It’s only because we know the importance of her final act that “Joy” is compelling even for the Lewis-indifferent, like me. In Santamaria’s clear, unsentimental telling, Davidman’s life was, from her birth in 1915 almost up until her death in 1960, dreary and unremarkable. But readers of “Joy” will know how it ends, and therein lies the question that keeps us reading: How will she win over this famously sensitive, witty writer? And in the last chapters, Davidman achieves a greatness of her own, in the nick of time, just ahead of death, in a way available to us all: by making a happy union.

Continue onward at The New York Times.