A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1977

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Key Figures

Sheldon “Van” Vanauken (The Author)

Vanauken was born into a wealthy family in Indiana. He was educated at various private schools up until his attendance at Wabash College, during which time he was to meet his wife, Davy. After marrying Davy, he was called into the naval service due to World War II and was stationed at Pearl Harbor during and after the infamous attack by Japanese forces. After his naval service, he and Davy studied at Yale and Oxford, and Vanauken eventually settled into a teaching job at Lynchburg College in rural Virginia, where he would teach the rest of his life.

Vanauken’s experiences as a highly educated and well-traveled individual and as a professor of English and an accomplished poet allowed him to compose a memoir such as A Severe Mercy with uncommon grace and insight. The same story coming from any other pen would not have been able to relate the same gravitas or emotional depth that such a narrative demands.

Jean “Davy” Davis

Jean Davis, known to her friends as Davy, was the middle child of her parents’ three children and met the author while attending the same college—she was a freshman, and he was a junior. She worked her way through college as a colorist in the local department store’s photography studio, where she met Van. From that point on, they began a courtship that would result in their marriage less than a year later. Though she had been the survivor of sexual assault as a teenager, resulting in a pregnancy that she would bear to term, eventually giving up the child for adoption, she and Van had determined never to have children together. Married to Van for 17 years, Davy died of liver failure at the age of 40 in a hospital in Virginia.

A woman of many interests, Davy was a lover of poetry, very well-educated, intelligent, and an artist. She painted throughout her life and contributed to the adornment of the various homes she and Van had over the years. She proved her husband’s equal in everything, whether in sailing, university education, or writing. As noted by her husband, her more passionate nature would eventually lead to her greater and more rapid ability to take the leap of faith into Christianity at a more profound and deeply committed level. Her ability to endure suffering with a cheerful heart and devote herself entirely to those she loved—especially her husband—allowed her to affect all with whom she came in contact.

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis, known by the nickname Jack to friends, was one of the most well-known English academics and authors of the 20th century. Having fought in the trenches in World War I, Lewis returned to England and served as a professor of Medieval Literature on the faculty of Magdalen College at Oxford University. Raised as a Christian, he spent many years as a convinced agnostic; his friendship with legendary author and fellow Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien would eventually lead to his conversion, as Tolkien and the other members of The Inklings—a small group of literary-minded friends of which Tolkien and Lewis were members—would demonstrate to Lewis that Christianity ultimately made sense and was, more than anything, true.

Lewis appears in the narrative at first almost as a celebrity with whom Van and Davy are infatuated or as a ghost, haunting the couple until they eventually become convinced of the truth of Lewis’s Christian conviction. Initially content to answer the couple’s questions by letter, Lewis would become their close friend, inviting Van to dinner and accepting dinner invitations at their home. Crucially, Lewis would also serve as a fast friend and consolation when Davy fell sick and died and in the years following her death, when Van attempted to grieve her loss, process the events of their life together, and move on to a place of peace and fulfillment.

In almost poetic fashion, Lewis himself would experience some of what Van and Davy did as his own wife experienced a terminal illness, dying before Lewis, leading to one of his most well-known and beloved works, A Grief Observed. Some of Lewis’s other most famous works are The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Mere Christianity.