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Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'Engle was an American writer who wrote young adult fiction, including A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door,
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in science.
Early life
Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born in New York City on November 29, 1918, and named after her great-grandmother, Madeleine L'Engle,
otherwise known as Mado. Her maternal grandfather was Florida banker Bion Barnett, co-founder of Barnett Bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Her mother,
a pianist, was also named Madeleine. Her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer, a critic, and a foreign correspondent who, according
to his daughter, suffered lung damage from mustard gas during World War I L'Engle wrote her first story at age five and began keeping a journal
at age eight. These early literary attempts did not translate into academic success at the New York City private school where she was enrolled.
A shy, clumsy child, she was branded as stupid by some of her teachers. Unable to please them, she retreated into her own world of books
and writing. Her parents often disagreed about how to raise her, and as a result she attended a number of boarding schools and had many governesses.
The L'Engles traveled frequently. At one point, the family moved to a château near Chamonix in the French Alps,
in what Madeleine described as the hope that the cleaner air would be easier on her father's lungs. Madeleine was sent
to a boarding school in Switzerland. However, in 1933, L'Engle's grandmother fell ill, and they moved near Jacksonville, Florida to be close to her.
L'Engle attended another boarding school, Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina. When her father died in October 1936,
Madeleine arrived home too late to say goodbye.
Adulthood
L'Engle attended Smith College from 1937 to 1941. After graduating cum laude from Smith, she moved to an apartment in New York City. In 1942,
she met actor Hugh Franklin when she appeared in the play The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. L'Engle married Franklin on January 26, 1946,
the year after the publication of her first novel, The Small Rain. Later she wrote of their meeting and marriage, "We met in The Cherry Orchard
and were married in The Joyous Season." The couple's first daughter, Josephine, was born in 1947. The family moved
to a 200-year-old farmhouse called Crosswicks in Goshen, Connecticut in 1952. To replace Franklin's lost acting income, they purchased
and operated a small general store, while L'Engle continued with her writing. Their son Bion was born that same year. Four years later,
seven-year-old Maria, the daughter of family friends who had died, came to live with the Franklins, and they adopted her shortly thereafter.
During this period, L'Engle also served as choir director of the local Congregational Church.
Career
L'Engle determined to give up writing on her 40th birthday when she received yet another rejection notice. "With all the hours I spent writing,
I was still not pulling my own weight financially." Soon she discovered both that she could not give it up and that she had continued
to work on fiction subconsciously. The family returned to New York City in 1959 so that Hugh could resume his acting career.
The move was immediately preceded by a ten-week cross-country camping trip, during which L'Engle first had the idea for her most famous novel,
A Wrinkle in Time, which she completed by 1960. It was rejected more than thirty times before she handed it to John C. Farrar;
it was finally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1962. In 1960 the Franklins moved
to an apartment in the Cleburne Building on West End Avenue. From 1960 to 1966, L'Engle taught at St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's School in New York.
In 1965 she became a volunteer librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, also in New York. She later served
for many years as writer-in-residence at the Cathedral, generally spending her winters in New York and her summers at Crosswicks. During the 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s, L'Engle wrote dozens of books for children and adults. Four of the books
for adults formed the Crosswicks Journals series of autobiographical memoirs. Of these,
The Summer of the Great-grandmother discusses L'Engle's personal experience caring for her aged mother,
and Two-Part Invention is a memoir of her marriage, completed after her husband's death from cancer on September 26, 1986.
Later years
L'Engle was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1991, but recovered well enough to visit Antarctica in 1992. Her son, Bion Franklin,
died on December 17, 1999, from the effects of extended alcoholism. He was forty-seven years old. In her final years, L'Engle became unable
to teach or travel due to reduced mobility from osteoporosis, especially after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in 2002.
She also abandoned her former schedule of speaking engagements and seminars. A few compilations of older work, some of it previously unpublished,
appeared after 2001. L'Engle died of natural causes at Rose Haven, a nursing facility close to her home in Litchfield, Connecticut, on September 6,
2007, according to a statement by her publicist the following day. She is interred in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan.
Religious beliefs
L'Engle was an Episcopalian and believed in universal salvation, writing that "All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all,
not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep.
All the little lost ones." As a result of her promotion of Christian universalism, many Christian bookstores refused to carry her books,
which were also frequently banned from Christian schools and libraries. At the same time, some of her most secular critics attacked her work
for being too religious. Her views on divine punishment were similar to those of George MacDonald,
who also had a large influence on her fictional work. She said "I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more
than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson.
And the lesson is always love." In 1982, L'Engle reflected on how suffering had taught her. She told how suffering a "lonely solitude"
as a child taught her about the "world of the imagination" that enabled her to write for children. Later she suffered a "decade of failure"
after her first books were published. It was a "bitter" experience, yet she wrote that she had "learned a lot of valuable lessons"
that enabled her to persevere as a writer.
On writing for children
Soon after winning the Newbery Medal for her 1962 "junior novel" A Wrinkle in Time,
L'Engle discussed children's books in The New York Times Book Review. The writer of a good children's book, she observed, may need to return to the
"intuitive understanding of his own childhood", being childlike although not childish. She claimed, "It's often possible
to make demands of a child that couldn't be made of an adult. a child will often understand scientific concepts that would baffle an adult.
This is, because he can understand
with a leap of the imagination that [which] is denied the grown-up who has acquired the little knowledge that is a dangerous thing." Of philosophy,
etc. as well as science, "the child will come to it with an open mind, whereas many adults come closed to an open book.
This is one reason so many writers turn to fantasy when they have something important and difficult to say."
The Madeleine L'Engle Collection
Since 1976, Wheaton College in Illinois has maintained a special collection of L'Engle's papers, and a variety of other materials, dating back
to 1919. The Madeleine L'Engle Collection includes manuscripts for the majority of her published and unpublished works, as well as interviews,
photographs, audio and video presentations, and an extensive array of correspondence with both adults and children, including artwork sent to her
by children.
Bibliographic overview
L'Engle's best-known works are divided between the "Chronos" and "Kairos" frameworks.
The former is the framework in which the stories of the Austin family take place and is presented in a primarily realistic setting,
though occasionally with elements that might be regarded as science fiction. The latter is the framework in which the stories of the Murry
and O'Keefe families take place and is presented sometimes in a realistic setting and sometimes in a more fantastic or magical milieu.
Generally speaking, the more realistic Kairos material is found in the O'Keefe stories, which deal with the second-generation characters. However,
the Murry-O'Keefe and Austin families should not be regarded as living in separate worlds, because several characters cross over between them,
and historical events are also shared. In addition to novels and poetry, L'Engle wrote many nonfiction works,
including the autobiographical Crosswicks Journals and other explorations of the subjects of faith and art. For L'Engle, who wrote repeatedly about
"story as truth", the distinction between fiction and memoir was sometimes blurred. Real events from her life
and family history made their way into some of her novels, while fictional elements, such as assumed names for people and places,
can be found in her published journals. A theme, often implied and occasionally explicit,
in L'Engle's works is that the phenomena that people call religion, science, and magic are simply different aspects of a single seamless reality.
Important L'Engle characters
Most of L'Engle's novels from A Wrinkle in Time onward are centered on a cast of recurring characters, who sometimes reappear decades older than
when they were first introduced. The "Kairos" books are about the Murry and O'Keefe families, with Meg Murry and Calvin O'Keefe marrying
and producing the next generation's protagonist, Polly O'Keefe. L'Engle wrote about both generations concurrently,
with Polly first appearing in 1965, well before the second book about her parents as teenagers. The "Chronos" books center on Vicky Austin
and her siblings. Although Vicky's appearances all occur during her childhood and teenage years,
her sister Suzy also appears as an adult in A Severed Wasp, with a husband and teenage children. In addition, two of L'Engle's early protagonists,
Katherine Forrester and Camilla Dickinson, reappear as elderly women in later novels. Rounding out the cast are several characters "who cross
and connect": Canon Tallis, Adam Eddington and Zachary Gray, who each appear in both the Kairos and Chronos books.
Chronos
The two Christmas books are shorter works, heavily illustrated, but not actually picture books.
The events in each of these stories take place prior to the events of Meet the Austins.
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