She was a brilliant poet and novelist who, ironically, is remembered primarily for being somebody's wife.

Were she alive today, Joy Davidman Lewis would have celebrated her 90th birthday earlier this year. In an amusing twist only God could engineer, the hardcore atheist and Communist ultimately wed the foremost Christian thinker of the last century: Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as Jack.

Lewis's American wife had been largely forgotten outside of Christian circles until the release of the 1993 film, Shadowlands. But even devoted Lewis-philes have only the sketchiest knowledge of the real-life woman whose death Lewis never recovered from. That's a pity, because Joy's life is a powerful story of how God can and does use people who spend the first 30 years of their lives kicking the Hound of Heaven in the teeth.

In an essay called "The Longest Way Round," Joy humorously notes that God sent the Heavenly Hound nipping at her heels quite early in life. Given her unorthodox upbringing, perhaps God felt He had to get an early start. Born in 1915, Joy writes that she "sucked in atheism with [my] canned milk." The daughter of an atheistic Jewish father and a nominally observant Jewish mother, Joy was an exceptionally bright child whose I.Q. was off the charts.

In his biography of Joy Davidman, And God Came In, Wheaton College Professor Lyle Dorsett writes that Joy's home was filled with fear and tension. Neither Joy, nor her brother Howard, could please their father, who put enormous pressure on his children to succeed academically. To make matters worse, Joy suffered from frequent illnesses, including anemia, scarlet fever, Grave's disease and a crooked spine.

At the age of eight, Joy declared her atheism after reading H.G. Wells's Outline of History. But honesty compelled Joy to admit to herself that there were certain things materialism could not explain.

For instance, there were her mystical dreams, including one recurring dream in which Joy found herself walking down a familiar street that suddenly becomes unfamiliar: In the distance, she can see "the towers of Fairyland." The dream seemed to be telling Joy that if she remembered the way carefully, she would find this fairyland when she woke up. Psychologist would call such a dream "wish fulfillment," Joy later wrote, but she could not help wondering why all human beings should "be born wanting something like that, unless it exists?"

And then there was Joy's taste in literature — a strange taste indeed for an atheist. "I believed the three-dimensional material world was the only thing that existed, but in literature it bored me," Joy recalls. "I didn't believe in the supernatural, but it interested me above all else. Only it had to be written as fiction; the supernatural presented as fact outraged my convictions. By disguising heaven as fairyland I was enabled to love heaven."

Her obsession with the spiritual realm began bubbling over into Joy's poetry, as well. Joy says she scribbled her verse "in a blind fury, not knowing what [I] wrote or why.... This inner personality was deeply interested in Christ, and didn't know it.... I quoted Jesus unconsciously in everything I did, from writing verse to fighting my parents. My first published poem was called "Resurrection" — a sort of private argument with Jesus, attempting to convince him (and myself) that he had never risen. I wrote it at Easter, of all possible seasons, and never guessed why.

Through her poems, Joy was asking what had become a "desperate question: Is life really only a matter of satisfying one's appetites, or is there more?"

Her illnesses caused Joy to miss many months of school; nevertheless, she began attending New York's Hunter College at age 15, graduating at 19 in 1934. She then entered Columbia University, leaving in 1935 with an M.A. in English Literature.

By the time she reached her 22nd birthday, Joy, who called herself an "iron materialist," had come to accept that life could not be lived entirely for pleasure, as materialism taught. Disturbed by the poverty of the Great Depression, and attempting to match her beliefs to reality, Joy embraced Communism. She was, Joy writes, "moved by the same unseen power that had directed my reading and my dreaming — I became a Communist because, later on, I was going to become a Christian.

"My motives were a mixed lot," she adds, "Youthful rebelliousness, youthful vanity, youthful contempt of the 'stupid people' who seemed to be running society, all these played a part."

The Party was glad to have her, and immediately put Joy to work writing for the Party magazine, New Masses, reviewing films, books, and poetry.

By then, Joy's literary accomplishments were beginning to attract attention and praise. Her collection of poetry, Letter to a Comrade (1938) won the Loines Memorial Fund award, sponsored by the National Institute of Arts and Letters (Robert Frost was named co-recipient). Her novel, Anya (1940), loosely based on her mother's memories of life in a Russian village, was also published to many accolades.

Joy's private life was thriving, as well. She met her future husband, William Gresham, at a Communist Party meeting. Like Joy, Bill was a writer and an atheist. The two wed in 1942 and became the parents of two sons, David, born in 1944, and Douglas, born in 1945.

With the responsibilities of motherhood, Joy gradually lost interest in Party activities. She had, at any rate, become somewhat disillusioned by its philosophy. "I learned," Joy writes, "that 'love of the people' turned into quite specific hatred of the people's enemies, and that the enemies of the people were all those of every class and opinion who happened to disagree with the Party."

Not long after Douglas' birth, the family moved from Queens, New York, 20 miles north to Ossinging. The young family needed more room — but Joy also had darker reasons for wanting to leave Queens: She wanted to separate her husband both from friends who encouraged him to drink and from a woman with whom he was having an affair.

Joy began to suffer from the strain of caring for two babies, money worries, Bill's bouts of drinking and infidelity — and the fear that Bill was approaching a mental collapse.

Her fears were soon realized. "One day he telephoned me from his New York Office ... to tell me that he was having a nervous breakdown. He felt his mind going; he couldn't stay where he was and he couldn't bring himself to come home.... Then he rang off."

Joy didn't know it, but the Heavenly Hound was about to pounce. As she wrote in The Longest Way Round, God "had been stalking me for a very long time, waiting for his moment; he crept nearer so silently that I never knew he was there. Then, all at once, he sprang."

Desperately frightened about her husband's disappearance, Joy spent the day telephoning friends; none had heard from him. "By nightfall there was nothing left to do but wait and see if he turned up, alive or dead," Joy writes. "I put the babies to sleep and waited. For the first time in my life I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, 'the master of my fate'.... All my defenses — the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God — went down momentarily. And God came in."

Joy's son Douglas, now 60, describes this episode as a personal visitation from the Holy Spirit. As Joy put it, there was "A Person with me in the room, directly present to my consciousness — a Person so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadow play. And I myself was more alive than I had ever been; it was like waking up from sleep.... My perception of God lasted perhaps half a minute."

In that half minute, Joy understood God had always been there, and that "since childhood, I had been pouring half my energy into the task of keeping him out.... When it was over I found myself on my knees, praying. I think I must have been the world's most astonished atheist."

Although she accepted God's existence, Joy had "the usual delusion that 'all religions mean the same thing,'" and hoped she could become "a good Jew, of the comfortable 'Reformed' persuasion." But as Dorsett observes, Joy "failed to find in Judaism any recognition of what she now believed she had received; in her words, 'the conviction of sin followed by the assistance of God's grace.'"

Determined to find the truth, Joy began studying various religions. "Some of them had wisdom up to a point," she writes, "Some of them had good ethical intentions, some of them had flashes of spiritual insight; but only one of them had complete understanding of the grace and repentance and charity that had come to me from God."

That religion was Christianity. "The Redeemer who had made himself known, whose personality I would have recognized among ten thousand — well, when I read the New Testament, I recognized him," Joy writes. "He was Jesus."

In 1948, the iron materialist and her children were baptized. Joy's friend Chad Walsh, author of C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, acted as a spiritual godfather to Joy: He introduced her to Lewis's writings, which she devoured voraciously, and which influenced her next novel, Weeping Bay.

Walsh encouraged Joy to write the Oxford don, which she did in January of 1950. Lewis was both impressed by and amused by Joy's letter, and the two began corresponding regularly.

Joy was growing in her faith — but the same could not be said of Bill Gresham. Although Joy's husband embraced Christianity when his wife did, he soon fell back into adultery and violent bouts of drinking. By 1952, Joy felt the need to "run away from him physically and consult one of the clearest thinkers of our time for help."

In August of 1952, Joy sailed for England. As soon as she was able to, Joy, in the company of a friend named Phyllis Williams, met Lewis for lunch at Oxford's Eastgate Hotel. Lewis quickly reciprocated, inviting Joy and Phyllis to lunch with him and his friend George Sayer in his rooms at Magdalen College. Other meetings followed, and at Christmas, Lewis invited Joy to spend two weeks visiting at the Kilns, the home he shared with his brother Warren (called Warnie).

Joy's letters and Warnie's diary reveal that this visit was a happy one. But the holiday was marred by a letter Joy received from Gresham, announcing that he was in love with another woman — Joy's cousin Renee — and wanted a divorce.

Joy returned to America to face an ugly situation. Although she believed that divorce should not be undertaken lightly, in light of Bill's adultery, alcoholism, and physical abuse of her, Joy privately told Walsh that ending the marriage would be "a blessed release."

In November 1953, Joy once again sailed for England, this time with nine-year-old David and eight-year-old Douglas in tow. Although the move to England appeared senseless to her friends, Dorsett writes, "Joy had the inner conviction that somehow this was part of God's design for her life now that Bill believed that their marriage should end."

With little financial support from Gresham, Joy and the boys lived in London in near poverty. Lewis helped out financially, paying the boys' school tuition, and Joy also received royalties for her latest book, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

As the months passed, it became obvious to their friends that Jack and Joy were growing closer — a situation that alarmed some of Lewis's admirers. As Dorsett told Boundless, "Some of these people had turned Lewis into a plaster saint, and St. Lewis could not marry a divorced woman. Second, Joy "lacked that civility that the British prize so much." Joy's earthy conversational style — considered perfectly acceptable in New York — grated on staid Oxford ears. Third, Dorsett says, "anti-Semitism in Britain was thick, and the thought that Lewis might marry a Jew was just more than a lot of them could take."

In August 1955, Joy and the boys moved to Headington, one mile from the Kilns. Lewis paid the rent on this house, and he and Joy began to see one another daily, often taking long walks together. That summer, when Chad Walsh and his wife, Eva, visited Lewis, Eva recalls that she "smelled marriage in the air."

But there were serious impediments to marriage between Joy and Jack. Lewis was a member of the Church of England, which taught that marriage was indesolvable, and thus, that remarriage after divorce was impossible. As well, divorce was considered shameful in that time and place. And, as Dorsett notes, when the lifelong bachelor fell in love, "he was embarrassed to admit it."

By early 1956, Lewis's hand was forced. The British Home Office refused to renew Joy's permit to remain in England. "Suddenly," Dorsett relates, Lewis "faced the prospect of losing the company of the woman he loved." He told George Sayer that he could not bear the thought of Joy returning to America.

On April 23, 1956, Lewis secretly married Joy in a civil ceremony at the Oxford Registry office. Lewis was, according to Dorsett, "still reluctant to take on his critics and bring Joy into his life as a wife. Rather than seek permission from the Church of England for a proper religious marriage, he pretended that this civil ceremony was nothing but a convenience."

But within a few months, Oxford was beginning to gossip about Lewis's daily visits to Joy's house, which often lasted until late at night. Concerned about Joy's reputation, Lewis did two things: He made plans to move the Greshams into the Kilns, and he sought permission to remarry Joy in the Church of England.

To the Bishop of Oxford, Lewis argued that as Bill Gresham had been divorced when he married Joy, the union between Bill and Joy was invalid (this is the Catholic view, not the view of the Church of England, which views all legal marriages as valid). Lewis contended that this meant that Joy and Bill's marriage was invalid — and that therefore, there was no reason for the church to refuse to allow Joy to marry Lewis.

The Bishop denied Lewis's request. At that point — as Lewis began preparing to move Joy and the children to the Kilns — an accident occurred that would alter the shape of their future. In October, Joy fell, breaking her hip. Doctors discovered that cancer had gnawed through her left femur, and had also invaded her breast.

On Christmas Eve — believing that his beloved wife was about to die, and no longer caring what others thought — Lewis announced to the world that he and Joy were man and wife.

The next few weeks were agony for them both. Joy underwent multiple surgeries and radiation treatment, which caused her to vomit continually. Her courage in the midst of great pain deeply moved her friends. As Warnie wrote in his diary, "I never loved her more than since she was struck down; her pluck and cheerfulness are beyond praise."

The pain served to bring Joy closer to God. She told the Walshes that her "physical agony was combined with a strange spiritual ecstasy. I think I know now how martyrs felt."

In March of 1957, Lewis asked his friend, the Reverend Peter Bide, to visit the hospital for a dual purpose: He wanted Bide to marry them in the Church, and he wanted Bide, who had become known for the healings that followed his prayers for the sick — to lay hands on Joy and ask God to heal her. On March 21, Warren wrote, "We all gathered in Joy's room.... Bide, [Joy], sister, and myself, communicated, and the marriage was celebrated."

Following the ceremony, Joy was brought home to the Kilns to die. But her cancer-ravaged body refused to cooperate. Miraculously, her condition began to improve — so much so that by fall, she was learning to walk again. By January 1958, her astonished doctors told Joy her cancer had been arrested.

Elated, Joy began writing, gardening, and running the Kilns. Letters from both Joy and Jack to friends reveal the extent of the happiness each was finding within the marriage. As Joy's condition improved, she and Lewis traveled to Ireland and Wales.

Sadly, the reprieve was brief. Doctors diagnosed a return of the cancer in October of 1959. Typically, Joy joked about her condition, telling a correspondent, "I've got so many cancers at work on me that I expect them to start organizing a union." In April of 1960 — knowing Joy had little time left — Lewis took her to Greece. Both were "enraptured," as Lewis put it, by the beauty of Athens, Attica, and Rhodes.

Back in Oxford, Joy underwent additional surgery, wrote letters, and played scrabble with Jack. But the end was drawing near. On July 13, Joy awoke screaming in agony. Lewis took her to the hospital, where the last few hours of her life ebbed painfully away.

Joy hung onto her sense of humor until the end. "Don't get me a posh coffin," she told Lewis. "Posh coffins are all rot."

She died that evening. Her last words were, "I am at peace with God."

The Hound of Heaven that relentlessly pursued Joy is now making sure the world will not forget the remarkable things He achieved in her life. Joy's excellent book, Smoke on the Mountain, is still taught in many a college classroom. Her influence also runs through several of Lewis's volumes, especially Till We Have Faces and The Four Loves.

Forty-five years after her death, Joy's conversion from the little girl who "sucked in atheism" to a Christian intellectual with a devouring hunger for God continues to inspire faith journeys in others. Within seven weeks of the release of the 1994 version of Shadowlands, some 10,000 copies of Lyle Dorsett's book about Joy, And God Came In, were sold in England alone. According to Dorsett, some of them were bought by former atheists who were just as surprised at their conversations as Joy was.

It's a reminder that no one is beyond the reach of a determined God — even when we spend half our lives rudely pushing Him away, as Joy did.

As Francis Thompson put it in his poem, "The Hound of Heaven:"

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter ...
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat — and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
'All things betray thee, who betrayed Me.'