Becoming Mrs. Lewis: The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Background

Authorial Context: Joy Davidman and Her Writing

Joy Davidman’s career as a writer was consistently overshadowed by her first husband, William Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley commands respect and fame as an example of noir fiction. After divorcing Bill, Joy married celebrated medievalist and early modernist C. S. Lewis. Davidman again languished outside the spotlight given to her more famous husband. Her work spans several decades and demonstrates mastery of formal elements, whether prose or poetry. These works include magazine articles, poems, and book-length works such as Weeping Bay and Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Her Letter to a Comrade, a collection of poems published in 1938, placed first in the Yale Younger Poet competition and was awarded the Russell Loines Memorial Award for poetry. In 2013, much of Davidman’s work was gifted to her son Douglas from one of Davidman’s friends in England (394). These papers are now housed at Wheaton College.

As a narrator, Joy mentions much of her own output, which remains largely unknown compared to the work of her two husbands. Despite her relative obscurity now, Becoming Mrs. Lewis demonstrates that Davidman remains her husbands’ peer. Davidman’s balancing of domestic duties and her authorial identity serve as one of the major concerns of the novel. Placing Lewis’s work above her own in Callahan’s novel, Joy gives voice to generations of female authors who were reduced to typing their husbands’ work or commenting and editing it. Her writings loom large in Becoming Mrs. Lewis, serving as epigraphs for all but one of the book’s chapters, with quotations from her sonnets appearing most frequently as chapter introductions. These sonnets, along with her book-length work, find expression throughout, as Bill criticizes Weeping Bay or Lewis offers to help with Smoke on the Mountain. Chapter 52 quotes from “Yet One More Spring” as it opens. These lines suggest a tie between writing and her identity that echoes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and the tie between writing and immortality:

I would create myself

In a little fume of words and leave my words

After my death to kiss you forever and ever (364).

Literary Context: The Inklings

The Inklings—mentioned throughout Becoming Mrs. Lewis—were a group of writers and students associated with Oxford University. Famous for members such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, the group consisted of male academics and authors and prohibited female members. Never official, the Inklings gathered in C. S. Lewis’s rooms at Magdalene College in Oxford or at various pubs, discussing work in progress or making fun of non-members’ work. Joy Davidman comments on the group in the novel, as she navigates Lewis’s friend group and tries to become part of his life. Finding “Tollers”—Tolkien’s nickname—brusque, Davidman sees the group in a balanced way—as both a sealed unit she will never be a part of and an intellectually-generative group. Although the novel describes the Inklings as close and productive, Joy, as a narrator, records her fictionalized retort to Tolkien when she responds to his inquiry about her reasons for visiting and joining Jack. Joy exclaims that she is “not here to collapse the walls of your men’s world or beg of you to let me become an Inkling” (121).

The most important part of the Inklings’ legacy remains in the writing produced by the various members, including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien and The Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis. A resulting connection between the Inklings and the high fantasy novels has been the result of the fame of these works and their authors, and the personal relationships among the Inklings bleed through to their works. As Joy admits in the novel, “Twice I’d been to see Jack before or after he’d met with former Inklings at the Bird and the Baby, which is where I learned that Toller’s talking tree, Treebeard, was modeled after Jack” (345). Besides influencing each other, the Inklings influenced Davidman in the novel. One of Davidman’s good friends in England, Florence Williams, nicknamed Michal, was the widow of Charles Williams, “a poet, theologian, author, and an Inkling with Jack and J. R. R. Tolkien” (71). While Jack encourages their initial friendship, Michal and Joy maintain a close connection.