Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L’Engle wrote one of the most unusual and most enduring children’s books in American literature — A Wrinkle in Time (1962), a novel that was rejected by over twenty-six publishers before finding a home at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and that went on to win the Newbery Medal, sell over fourteen million copies, and become one of those rare books that children love with a fierce, personal devotion that persists into adulthood. Its combination of quantum physics, Christian mysticism, family love, and a plain, brave, bespectacled heroine who saves the universe through the power of love was unlike anything else in children’s literature, and its influence on subsequent writers — from Philip Pullman to Rebecca Stead — has been immense.

Early Life and Struggle

Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in New York City in 1918, the only child of a journalist father and a pianist mother. She had a lonely childhood — she was shy, bookish, and unhappy at school — and attended boarding schools in the United States and Switzerland. She graduated from Smith College in 1941 and moved to New York, where she worked in the theatre and published her first novel, The Small Rain (1945), a semi-autobiographical story of a boarding-school girl who finds her identity through music.

In 1946, she married Hugh Franklin, an actor who later became famous for playing Dr. Charles Tyler on the television soap opera All My Children. They moved to rural Connecticut, where L’Engle ran a general store, raised three children, and wrote novels that nobody published. The decade of the 1950s was a period of professional despair — she considered giving up writing entirely. Then she wrote A Wrinkle in Time.

A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time tells the story of Meg Murry, a stubborn, intelligent, socially awkward fourteen-year-old whose physicist father has disappeared while working on a mysterious project involving a “tesseract” — a wrinkle in the fabric of space-time. Guided by three supernatural beings — Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which — Meg, her precocious younger brother Charles Wallace, and her classmate Calvin O’Keefe travel across the universe to the planet Camazotz, where Meg’s father is imprisoned by IT, a disembodied brain that represents totalitarian conformity.

The book was rejected by publisher after publisher — it was too strange, too intellectual, too religious, too science-fictional for the children’s market of the early 1960s. John C. Farrar of Farrar, Straus and Giroux finally accepted it, and it won the 1963 Newbery Medal. It has been continuously in print since publication and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

The novel’s power comes from its emotional honesty. Meg is not a conventional heroine — she is angry, impatient, and insecure — and her triumph comes not from physical courage or cleverness but from her ability to love. The theological dimension — L’Engle was a committed Episcopalian who drew on Christian thought throughout her work — is woven into the fabric of the story rather than preached, and the novel has been both praised by religious readers and banned by fundamentalist Christians who objected to its inclusion of Jesus alongside Buddha and Gandhi as fighters against evil.

The Time Quintet and Austin Family

L’Engle continued the story of the Murry and O’Keefe families in four subsequent novels: A Wind in the Door (1973), which takes place partly inside a mitochondrion; A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978, National Book Award), which involves time travel to prevent nuclear war; Many Waters (1986), which sends the Murry twins to the time of Noah; and An Acceptable Time (1989). The series — the “Time Quintet” — moves from physics to biology to history with L’Engle’s characteristic blend of science and spirituality.

The Austin Family Chronicles — beginning with Meet the Austins (1960) and including The Moon by Night (1963), The Young Unicorns (1968), A Ring of Endless Light (1980, Newbery Honor), and Troubling a Star (1994) — are more realistic but equally concerned with moral and spiritual questions.

Spiritual Writing

L’Engle was also a prolific writer of spiritual and autobiographical works. A Circle of Quiet (1972), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), The Irrational Season (1977), and Two-Part Invention (1988) — the “Crosswicks Journals” — are meditations on creativity, faith, family life, and ageing that have been widely read by Christian and secular audiences alike. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (1980) is her most sustained statement of the relationship between creativity and Christian belief.

Collecting L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962) in first edition with dust jacket is one of the most sought-after modern children’s books. The first edition is identified by the publisher’s name (Cudahy was dropped from later printings) and specific binding points. Fine copies with unclipped jackets in near-fine condition regularly sell for thousands of dollars. Signed copies are relatively available from L’Engle’s later years, when she signed generously at events.