A Grief Observed was published by Faber and Faber in September 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk — Lewis was too exposed, too raw, to put his own name on it. It was revealed as his work only after his death in 1963. The book is a journal Lewis kept in the weeks and months after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, from cancer in July 1960. It is the most emotionally honest thing Lewis ever wrote, and it systematically demolishes the confident apologetics of his earlier works.
The Book
The journal opens with an extraordinary sentence: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” What follows is not the measured, reasonable Lewis of Mere Christianity but a man in genuine crisis. He cannot pray. He cannot think. He is angry at God — not abstractly, but with the specific fury of a man who trusted God and feels betrayed.
“Where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.”
Lewis had written The Problem of Pain in 1940, a calm philosophical treatise on suffering. Now, confronting actual suffering — his own — he finds his earlier arguments hollow. Not wrong, exactly, but inadequate: too neat, too abstract, too comfortable.
The book moves through phases: rage, despair, questioning, and eventually a tentative, hard-won return to faith — not the triumphant faith of his apologetics but a humbler, more uncertain faith that has been broken and reassembled.
Collecting A Grief Observed
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1961): Published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. Blue cloth with dust jacket.
Market values (with dust jacket):
- First edition (as N.W. Clerk), fine in jacket: $3,000–$8,000
- Very good in jacket: $1,000–$3,000
- Without jacket: $300–$800
First American edition (Seabury Press, Greenwich, CT, 1963): Published under Lewis’s real name after his death. $500–$1,500.
The 1993 film Shadowlands (starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger) dramatized Lewis’s marriage and bereavement, boosting awareness and prices. The pseudonymous first edition is the primary collecting target.