Joy Gresham
Joy Gresham may be best known as C.S. Lewis' friend, intellectual partner, and wife, but she deserves greater recognition as a politically committed poet. Born in 1915, Helen Joy Davidman was raised in a family of Polish and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and quickly revealed herself as a child prodigy, reading H.G. Wells' Outline of History by the age of eight, and entering Hunter College by the age of fourteen. By 1936, she was publishing her poems in Poetry, the most prestigious magazine of the time. Her poetry collection, Letters to a Comrade, won her the Yale Younger Poets Series Award, and in the next year she shared with Robert Frost the award of the Loines Memorial Fund. Her poetry translated and displayed her commitment to social causes, reinforced by her membership in the American Communist Party. An abusive marriage with writer William Lindsay Gresham led her to Christianity for emotional support, and subsequently to seeking advice from her - until then via correspondence only - friend C.S. Lewis. She joined C.S. Lewis in 1953 in England. From then until her death in 1960, Joy Gresham and C.S. Lewis were inseparable, a true marriage of souls. Lewis' A Grief Observed, in its anguished reexamining of his faith in the face of Joy's death, stands as a tribute to this too-short intellectual partnership of equals.
