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

Part 3 opens with a quotation from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of Lewis’s novels from The Chronicles of Narnia series. Aslan, the creator who represents the Christian God, counsels his audience to have courage.

Chapter 28 opens with an epigraph from Davidman’s “Sonnet of Misunderstandings,” describing the speaker’s disobedience in love.

Joy returns home to New York and enters the farmhouse. Bill hears her, and they argue. As his accusations fly, his anger overcomes him, and he begins to choke her. Renee sees them, commanding them to stop. Joy runs upstairs, throwing Renee’s personal effects out of the bedroom she and Joy shared. As soon as Davy and Douglas arrive home, Joy runs downstairs, embracing them and swearing never to leave them again.

Chapter 29 opens with an epigraph from Davidman’s “Sonnet XII,” which appears dismissive of the speaker’s worth.

On a train to New York to attend a reunion of the MacDowell Colony, where she and Bill originally met, Joy recounts the constant fights in the house between Bill and her. The chapter then includes excerpts from letters between Joy and Jack, with Joy decrying Bill’s cruelty and Jack counseling patience and faith even as he acknowledges her pain.