Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis
“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“Plumbing the depths of unpublished documents, Santamaria reveals the vision and writing of a young woman whose coming of age in the turbulent thirties is both distinctive and emblematic of her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 
1119983067
Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis
“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 
17.99 In Stock
Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis

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

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

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

by Abigail Santamaria

eBook

$17.99  $23.99 Save 25% Current price is $17.99, Original price is $23.99. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers

LEND ME® See Details

Overview

“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 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780547843704
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: 04/01/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 168,086
File size: 23 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

1
 
1892–1930
 
In a recurring dream throughout her childhood, Joy Davidman found herself walking down a road she called Daylight Street. In time, she rounded a corner and followed a crooked, grassy path into an unfamiliar world. Joy ambled through that world, lost but unafraid, until the trail opened onto “a strange, golden, immeasurable plane,” as she described it, writing extensively about the dream in poetry and prose. Far in the distance rose the towers of Fairyland. Joy’s heart swelled with longing as she beheld a perfect kingdom defined by love, devoid of sorrow, capable of consummating every good desire. “Hate and heartbreak / All were forgot there.”
       But before she could reach the castle gates, she woke up in the Bronx. Instead of a palace threshold, her round brown eyes saw only items in her bedroom: ballet slippers for the dreaded dance lessons her parents required, crisp dresses that made her into her mother’s perfect doll, and books that were her waking sanctuary in what often felt like a foreign land. Among her favorites were Greek myths ?— ?she longed to visit the land of the gods ?— ?and “ghost stories and superscience stories” by Lord Dunsany and George MacDonald, the Victorian minister whose fantasies evoked the same visceral desire as her dream, suggesting that everything sad could become untrue.
       Hope lingered in the morning hours. “If I remembered the way carefully, the dream told me, I should be able to find it when I woke up.” For a fanciful child born during the Great War and raised in America’s “New Era” of postwar prosperity, a Fairyland on earth ?— ?as rich with material resources as her dream kingdom was rich with the immaterial ?— ?seemed almost possible. In the distance, automobile motors roared above the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the Grand Concourse, the fashionable thoroughfare two blocks from 2707 Briggs Avenue in the genteel middle-class neighborhood where Joy lived with her parents, Joseph and Jeannette, and younger brother Howard, whom Joy came to call Howie. The rhythm of construction joined an orchestra of street sounds, heralding blocks of brand-new art deco apartment buildings with elegant sunken living rooms, electrical and waste disposal systems, refrigerators instead of iceboxes, elevators, and gracious lobbies adorned with marble inlay. “Every day, in every way, the world was getting more comfortable.”
       But not the world inside herself, and not the local landscape populated with peers and parents. Joy was a sickly, lonely girl, a social outcast at school and a disappointment at home to immigrant parents who governed according to the goals of assimilation and success. They, too, had been branded in childhood with the shame of otherness. “They showed their affection by almost incessant criticism,” she told a newspaper reporter who profiled her life. They were “well-meaning but strict.” Off the record, she was less subtle. “‘Well-meaning but strict’ . . . is certainly damning by faint praise,” she wrote to a friend. “But since the truth would have called for loud damns, I don’t know how I could have put it milder.” She left the specifics to her reader’s imagination.
       It would be decades before Joy understood the meaning of her dreams, but for her, Fairyland was never the standard little girl’s fantasy of opulence or romance. Joy would come to interpret the dream as a universal quest for eternal life, for a destination that could resolve her unconscious conviction that the perfect version of everything lay just ahead.
       “There is a myth that has always haunted mankind, the legend of the Way Out,” she would write many years later, “the door leading out of time and space into Somewhere Else. We all go out of that door eventually, calling it death. But the tale persists that for a few lucky ones the door has swung open before death, letting them through . . . or at least granting them a glimpse of the land on the other side. The symbol varies . . . [F]or some, the door itself is important; for others, the undiscovered country beyond it ?— ?the never-never land, Saint Brendan’s Island, the Land of Heart’s Desire . . . Whatever we call it, it is more our home than any earthly country.” Joy called it Fairyland, a place she visited in her dreams and searched for in her waking hours.
       C. S. Lewis, in his first published novel, The Pilgrim’s Regress, calls it the Island. That book ?— ?an allegorical revision of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress written shortly after Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity ?— ?would teach Joy the meaning of her childhood dreams. “By disguising fairyland as heaven,” Joy wrote after becoming a Christian, “I was enabled to love heaven.” Before this revelation and after, Joy’s attempts to reach the castle would determine the course of her brief yet abundant life. In forty-five years she embraced more milestones and worldviews than most people experience in a lifetime twice as long. Her Daylight Street would detour into a romance with the Communist Party, whose propaganda would seduce her into mistaking the Soviet Union for her utopic Fairyland. The route would dead-end in a miserable first marriage to Bill Gresham, a troubled Spanish civil war veteran, Joy’s partner in a misguided dance with Dianetics ?— ?another illusion. And the road would inevitably lead to C. S. Lewis, Joy’s final embodiment of heaven on earth, and the man who would point her in the direction of the Fairyland that would finally satisfy her heart.

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Introduction,
1892–1930,
1930–1934,
1934–1938,
1938–1939,
June–December 1939,
1939–1942,
1942–1944,
1944–1946,
Photos,
1946–1950,
1950–1952,
August 1952–January 1953,
January–November 1953,
November 1953–April 1954,
Fall 1954–October 1956,
Fall 1956–Fall 1957,
1958–1960,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Photo Credits,
Index,
About the Author,

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews