Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in New York City on November 29, 1918, and became an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She grew up in a literary and musical household: her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer, critic, and foreign correspondent, and her mother, Madeleine Hall Barnett, was a pianist. Her childhood was marked by movement, illness in the family, and a feeling of not fitting in. A shy, awkward child, she was called stupid by some teachers at her New York City private school. She began writing early, producing her first story at five and keeping a journal from age eight.

Her parents often differed over how she should be raised, so L’Engle attended several boarding schools and had many governesses. The family traveled often, including a move to a château near Chamonix in the French Alps, where cleaner air was hoped to help her father’s damaged lungs. She later attended school in Switzerland, then Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, after the family moved near Jacksonville, Florida, to be close to her ill grandmother. Her father died in October 1936, and L’Engle arrived home too late to say goodbye. From 1937 to 1941 she attended Smith College, graduating cum laude.

L’Engle published her early novels The Small Rain in 1945 and Ilsa in 1946. Around the same time, she met actor Hugh Franklin while appearing in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and they married on January 26, 1946. Their daughter Josephine was born in 1947. In 1952 the family moved to Crosswicks, a 200-year-old farmhouse in Goshen, Connecticut, where they bought and ran a small general store after Franklin lost acting income. Their son Bion was born that year, and several years later they adopted Maria, the daughter of friends who had died. L’Engle also served as choir director of the local Congregational church.

Her best-known book, A Wrinkle in Time, began as an idea during a ten-week cross-country camping trip. She completed it by 1960, but it was rejected more than thirty times before John C. Farrar accepted it for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Published in 1962, it won the Newbery Medal and became the work most closely associated with her name. L’Engle later argued that a good children’s writer may need to return to “the intuitive understanding of his own childhood.” She believed children could meet difficult ideas with an open mind and a “leap of the imagination,” especially in fantasy, where science, philosophy, and hard questions could be brought together.

Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, L’Engle wrote dozens of books for both children and adults. Four adult books formed the Crosswicks Journals, autobiographical memoirs in which she drew on family life, care, marriage, and loss. The Summer of the Great-grandmother described caring for her aging mother, while Two-Part Invention, completed after Hugh Franklin’s death from cancer in 1986, became a memoir of their marriage. She often wrote about “story as truth,” and in her work the line between fiction and memoir could blur: real family history entered novels, while fictional elements appeared in published journals.

L’Engle was a Christian who attended Episcopal churches and believed in universal salvation, a view that led some Christian bookstores to refuse her books and some evangelical schools and libraries to ban them. Some secular critics, meanwhile, found her work too religious. She lived through rejection, private grief, public criticism, and serious injury in a 1991 automobile accident, yet continued to be associated with imagination, faith, and the courage to ask large questions in plain language. She died on September 6, 2007. Her sentences still draw interest because they come from a writer who trusted children, honored mystery, and treated story as a way of telling the truth.