Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born in New York City in 1918, the only child of a concert pianist mother and a journalist father. She had an isolated childhood — sent to boarding school in Switzerland, largely self-educated in fiction — and began writing stories as a child as a way of inhabiting worlds more interesting than the one she was in. She studied at Smith College, worked briefly in theater in New York, married actor Hugh Franklin, and spent most of the 1950s raising three children on a Connecticut farm while writing novels that found no audience. By the time she turned forty she had largely accepted that her writing career had failed.

Then came A Wrinkle in Time. Completed in 1960, the novel was rejected by twenty-six publishers over two years. Farrar, Straus and Giroux finally accepted it in 1962. It won the Newbery Medal in 1963. The premise: Meg Murry, the awkward, myopic daughter of two physicists, travels through a tesseract — a wrinkle in space-time — with her brother and friend, guided by three supernatural beings, to rescue her father from a planet controlled by a disembodied malevolent brain called IT. The book blends astrophysics, Christian theology, and the emotional reality of adolescent social failure with no apparent strain. Meg is one of the most precisely observed protagonists in children's literature: genuinely difficult, genuinely scared, and genuinely brave.

The sequels — A Wind in the Door (1973) and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) — continued the Murry family's adventures at the cellular and cosmological scales, respectively. L'Engle also wrote the Austin family series (more realistic, less speculative), adult mainstream novels, volumes of spiritual autobiography (A Circle of Quiet, The Irrational Season), and poetry. None of it reached the audience that A Wrinkle in Time found.

The novel's reception among religious communities illustrates its peculiar position. Some Christian schools and libraries removed it for being too scientific and implying a universe too large for conventional theology. Some secular schools questioned its explicit Christianity — the three beings quote the New Testament; the battle against IT is explicitly a battle against darkness in a spiritual sense. L'Engle was a deeply committed Episcopalian who saw no contradiction between science and faith and found the institutional reactions on both sides equally obtuse. She spoke and wrote at length about this throughout her career.

The 2018 Disney film adaptation, directed by Ava DuVernay and starring Storm Reid, was a major theatrical release that departed significantly from the novel's tone and theological content. It received mixed reviews and performed below expectations commercially. The adaptation prompted a new wave of readers to the source, which is how it usually goes.

L'Engle died in 2007 at eighty-eight, having spent most of her career on the staff of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. A Wrinkle in Time has never gone out of print and has sold over ten million copies. The readers who encounter it at the right developmental moment — roughly ten to thirteen — tend to carry it for the rest of their lives, which is a different kind of legacy from critical canonization but arguably more durable.