Madeleine L'Engle
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Madeleine L'Engle (née Madeleine L'Engle Camp), was born November 29, 1918 in New York City). The American writer is best known for her children's books, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind In The Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters. Her works reflect her strong interest in modern science; mitochondrial DNA, for instance, is featured prominently in A Wind in the Door, tesseracts in A Wrinkle in Time, organ regeneration in Arm of the Starfish and so forth.
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Biography
Madeleine L'Engle Camp was named after her great-grandmother, Madeleine L'Engle, otherwise known as Mado. Young Madeleine's mother, a pianist, was also named Madeleine. Her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer and critic, and a foreign correspondent whose lungs were damaged by exposure to mustard gas during World War I. The future author of A Wrinkle in Time wrote her first story at the age of five, and started keeping a journal at the age of eight. These early literary attempts did not translate into success at the New York City private school where she was enrolled. Madeleine's shyness, and clumsiness in gym class, led to her being branded as stupid by some of her teachers, especially her homeroom teacher. Unable to please them, she stopped trying to do so, and retreated into a world of favorite books and her own writing.
In 1929 the Camps moved to a chateau near Chamonix in the French Alps, in the hope that the cleaner air would be easier on Charles Camp's lungs. Madeleine herself was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. In 1933 the family moved to northern Florida, and Madeleine attended another boarding school, Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina. When Madeleine's father died in 1935, she was unable to get home in time to say goodbye.
She attended Smith College from 1937 to 1941. After graduation she moved to an apartment in New York City. In 1942 she was appearing in the play The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov when she met actor Hugh Franklin. L'Engle married Franklin on January 26, 1946, the year after the publication of her autobiographical first novel, The Small Rain. The couple's first daughter, Josephine, was born in 1947.
In 1952 the family moved to a 200-year-old farmhouse called Crosswicks in rural Connecticut. To replace Hugh'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. During this period, L'Engle also served as choir director of the local Congregational Church. In 1956, Maria, the seven-year-old daughter of family friends, came to live with the Franklins after the deaths of her parents, eventually becoming part of the Franklin family.
L'Engle's life changed dramatically beginning in 1959. That year the Franklins moved back to New York City, where Hugh could resume his acting career. The move was 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. L'Engle completed the book in 1960. Twenty-six publishers rejected the story before Farrar, Straus and Giroux finally published it in 1962.
From 1960 to 1966, L'Engle taught at St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's Anglican School in New York. Overlapping this slightly, in 1965 she became a volunteer librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, also in New York. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s she wrote dozens of books for children and adults, and won numerous awards in the process. One of her books for adults, Two-Part Invention, was a memoir of her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin, completed after her husband's death from cancer on September 26, 1986. L'Engle was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1991, but recovered enough to visit Antarctica in 1992. Bion Franklin died in December, 1999.
For many years Madeleine L'Engle maintained her role as writer-in-residence at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, generally spending her winters in New York and her summers at Crosswicks. However, this is no longer the case due to her deteriorating health in recent years. Her former schedule of speaking engagements, seminars, etc. has also been abandoned for the same reason. However, as recently as 2004, the claim was made that she is still writing. Whether any new writing will appear in print in the foreseeable future remains to be seen, but a few compilations of older work, some of it previously unpublished, have appeared in the new century.
Bibliographic overview
L'Engle's best-known works are divided between "chronos" and "kairos"; the former is the framework in which the stories of the Austin family take place, and is presented in a primarily realistic framework, 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 framework and sometimes in a more fantastic or magical framework. Generally speaking, the more realistic kairos material is found in the O'Keefe stories, which deal with the second generation characters.
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 has written many nonfiction titles, including the autobiographical Crosswicks Journals and other explorations of the subjects of faith and art. For L'Engle, who has written repeatedly about "story as truth," the distinction between fiction and memoir is sometimes blurred. Real events from her life and family history have 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 what humans call religion, science and magic are simply different aspects of a single seamless reality: a similar theme may be discerned in the fiction works of C. S. Lewis or Laurell K. Hamilton.
Partial list of works
Kairos
- First-generation (Murry)(Time quartet)
- A Wrinkle in Time (1962) (Newbery Award Winner)
- A Wind in the Door (1973)
- Many Waters (1986)
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978)<ref>A Swiftly Tilting Planet was published before Many Waters but takes place a few years later.</ref>
- Second-generation (O'Keefe)
- The Arm of the Starfish (1965)
- Dragons in the Waters (1976)
- A House like a Lotus (1984)
- An Acceptable Time (1989)
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Chronos
- Meet the Austins (1960)
- The Moon By Night (1963)
- The Young Unicorns (1968)
- A Ring of Endless Light (1980) (Newbery Honor Book)
- Troubling a Star (1994)
- A Severed Wasp (1982)
Other fiction
Katherine Forrester series:
- The Small Rain (1945)
- Prelude (1968)
- A Severed Wasp (1982)
Camilla Dickenson:
- Camilla (1951)
- A Live Coal in the Sea (1996)
Single titles:
- Ilsa (1946)
- And Both Were Young (1949)
- The Love Letters (1966)
- The Other Side Of The Sun (1971)
- Certain Women (1996)
The Crosswicks Journals
- A Circle of Quiet (1972)
- The Summer of the Great-grandmother (1974)
- The Irrational Season (1977)
- Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (1988)
Poetry
- Lines Scribbled On An Envelope (1969)
- The Weather Of The Heart (1978)
- A Cry Like A Bell (1987)
- The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005) (includes reprints from the above)
About L'Engle
- Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life Compiled by Carole Chase
Important L'Engle characters
Recurring Kairos characters:
Murry
- Alexander Murry — Astrophysicist in the employ of the Federal government of the United States. He took part in an early experiment in "tessering" and was consequently lost on the planet Camazotz for several years.
- Katherine Murry — Microbiologist and Nobel laureate. Works from lab located at her rural home.
- Meg (Margaret) Murry — Eldest daughter of Alexander and Katherine. Somewhat awkward and plain as an adolescent, she acquired social graces and beauty during the course of her maturation covered in A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. As a child, she was closest to her youngest brother, Charles Wallace; in later life, Charles Wallace was largely absent owing to secret responsibilities. It is sometimes ambiguous whether Meg is merely a mathematical genius or has also acquired her Ph.D.
- Sandy (Alexander) and Dennys (Dionysus) Murry — Twin sons of Alexander and Katherine. They describe themselves as the "squares" of the Murry clan. As teenagers, they take a trip to Biblical times, specifically the time immediately preceding the Deluge. In later life, Sandy is an "anti-corporate" lawyer, and Dennys is a doctor.
- Charles Wallace Murry — The youngest of the Murry clan. Charles Wallace is "something new", i.e., superhuman in intelligence (broadly conceived), an evolutionary next step. He is a key protagonist in A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the site for the climax of A Wind in the Door, but mostly absent from the later books. Charles Wallace is also very small for his age and is misunderstood and bullied by his peers at school.
O'Keefe
- Calvin O'Keefe — Marine biologist, husband of Meg, father of a large brood. As a boy, Calvin was a "sport" among what the uncharitable might call degenerate white trash, excelling academically, socially, and in sports from an early age, but feeling disconnected from his peers. He found a truer home with the Murrys.
- Polly/Poly (Polyhymnia) O'Keefe — Eldest child of Meg and Calvin. Named, somewhat to her annoyance, by her eccentric Godfather Canon Tallis. Poly takes part in various socio-political intrigues in Arm of the Starfish and Dragons in the Waters, more personal ones in House like a Lotus, and is incorporated into the Murry time-and-space travel tradition with An Acceptable Time.
- Charles O'Keefe — Named for Charles Wallace Murry, Charles is characterized by sensitivity to others, clairvoyance, and an introspective personal style.
Other
- Simon Bolivar Quentin Phair Renier — Simon appears in Dragons in the Waters as a young boy of poor but aristocratic southern background, flung somewhat suddenly into the wide world after the sale of a portrait of Bolivar which was one of the last heirlooms of his family. He encounters the O'Keefe clan and Canon Tallis, and eventually comes into contact with another set of noble roots in distant Venezuela. Although Simon himself does not appear in other books, some of his relatives appear in The Other Side of the Sun and Ilsa.
Crossover characters
- Canon Tallis — Tallis is probably the most frequently recurring character without genetic affiliation to the Murrys and Austins. Rather like a cross between G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown and Ian Fleming's James Bond, Tallis provides spiritual leadership and insight into the realms of crime and international intrigue in equal measure.
- Adam Eddington — Marine biologist. Adam first appears in Arm of the Starfish working as an intern for Calvin O'Keefe. He is caught up in a power struggle between the O'Keefes and an unscrupulous industrialist vying for control of an emergent medical technology. Later, working with dolphins (to which he was introduced by Polly O'Keefe) in New England, he comes into contact with Vicky Austin.
- Zachary Gray — Extremely affluent, disaffected young man, oscillating between his desires for redemption and self-destruction. Has rather complex relationships with both Polly O'Keefe and Vicky Austin.
- Katherine Forrester (Vigneras) — Main character of The Small Rain (also published as Prelude) and A Severed Wasp. In The Small Rain, Katherine is a gifted, but socially isolated, adolescent studying to be a concert pianist at a strict boarding school. Katherine reappears in Severed Wasp at the other end of her life, as an old woman (now Katherine Vigneras) looking back on her life and career. Katherine Vigneras also appears in A Ring of Endless Light when she plays a recital that Vicky Austin and Zachary Gray attend.
- Mimi Oppenheimer (Mimi Opp) — Surgeon. She attends the same boarding school as the daughter in A Winter's Love and stays with the family in the Haute-Savoie. She later appears as Katherine Forrester's neighbor and friend in A Severed Wasp.
Bibliography
- A Circle of Quiet ISBN 0062545035
- Scholastic BookFiles: A Reading Guide to A Wrinkle in Time ISBN 0439463645
- Suncatcher: A Study of Madeleine L'Engle And Her Writing by Carole F. Chase ISBN 1880913313