Part One
In a most improbable friendship, she found love. In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice.
Part Two
Part Three
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Recommended Reading
Historical Fiction
Patti Callahan
Now a USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestseller!
In a most improbable friendship, she found love. In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice.
From New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan comes an exquisite novel of Joy Davidman, the woman C. S. Lewis called “my whole world.” When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.
In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice—and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had.
At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story—a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.
Videos
Becoming Mrs. Lewis Follow the Journey with Patti to Oxford, England
Meet C. S. Lewis’s wife Joy Davidman
Tour Magdalen College
The Glory of Oxford, England
C. S. Lewis's home—The Kilns
The Places of Joy Davidman
C. S. Lewis and the Woman He Loved
With C. S. Lewis Chair Terry Lindvall
Praise
“Making full use of historical documentation, Callahan has created an incredible portrait of a complex woman.” — Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Mesmerizing.” —BOOKLIST review
“Patti Callahan Henry breathes wondrous fresh life into one of the greatest literary love stories of all time . . . The result is a deeply moving story about love and loss that is transformative and magical.” —Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan’s Tale
"It's not supposed to be a technical biography of my mother. It's a novel. And it's a very good one. . . extraordinarily accurate. . . more accurate than most biographical essays that have been written about my mother." — Douglas Gresham, son of Joy Davidman, wife of C.S. Lewis.
“I was swept along, filled with hope, and entirely beguiled, not only by the life lived behind the veil of C. S. Lewis’s books but also by the woman who won his heart. A literary treasure from first page to last.” —Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours
“Profoundly evocative, revealing an intimate view of a woman whose love and story had never been fully told . . . until now . . . Becoming Mrs. Lewis is a tour de force and the must-read of the season!” —Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of Beach House Reunion
"Patti Callahan somehow inhabits Davidman, taking her readers inside the writer’s hungry mind and heart. We keenly feel Davidman’s struggle to become her own person at a time (the 1950s) when women had few options . . . An astonishing work of biographical fiction." —Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe
"Patti Callahan breathes life into this fascinating woman whose hunger for knowledge leads her to buck tradition at every turn." —Diane Chamberlain, New York Times bestselling author of The Dream Daughter
An intimate and daring literary achievement.”
—Charles Martin, NYT bestselling author of The Mountain Between Us
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times best-selling author of fourteen novels, including the historical fiction, BECOMING MRS. LEWIS—The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis. Her fifteenth novel, THE FAVORITE DAUGHTER, (Southern Contemporary Fiction) will be published June 4, 2019, and available now.
A full-time author and mother of three children, she now resides in both Mountain Brook, Alabama and Bluffton, South Carolina with her husband.