A Wrinkle In Time
A Wrinkle In Time
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Madeleine L'Engle on A Wrinkle In Time
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Physics as theology, questions as fuelThe book began in a period of genuine intellectual and spiritual displacement. L’Engle was in her thirties, running a general store in rural Connecticut, and the questions she was carrying had outgrown the institutions she had turned to for answers. Physics filled the gap that church had left open.
Einstein was my entrance into the world of astrophysics and quantum mechanics (it’s my theology). I was asking myself all the big questions about life and the universe and not finding the answers.
The motivation went back further than Einstein, further even than the book’s conception. When asked in 1995 what she was trying to discover through writing, L’Engle traced the impulse to age five and to a specific, unanswerable grief: her father was dying from mustard gas exposure he had suffered in the First World War, and she had no framework for what she was watching.
I wrote my first story when I was five, because I wanted to know why my father was coughing his lungs out from mustard gas he was exposed to in the First World War. Why is it that people hurt each other? Why don’t people love each other? I learned quickly that a story is the best place to explore these unanswerable questions.
The book’s plot, in which Meg Murry crosses the universe searching for a father who has gone missing, carries this history in its bones.
By the time the manuscript was finished, L’Engle understood exactly what she had been working toward. The entry in her private journal on June 2, 1960, before a single publisher had seen it, was unequivocal.
If I’ve ever written a book that says what I believe about God and the universe, this is it.
How she wrote it
Three strangers in a desert, and decades of refusalThe three supernatural guides at the center of the novel arrived without warning on a cross-country drive. L’Engle’s granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis has described how Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which came to L’Engle while she was passing through the Painted Desert, and how L’Engle told her children on the spot that she would have to write a book about them. [paraphrased from audio] Back in Connecticut, she chose her opening line with full deliberateness.
With Wrinkle, I started with the deliberate old chestnut of the dark and stormy night. I get my own attention first. If it doesn’t grab me it’s not going to grab the reader.
Her science was not atmosphere or decoration. She had spent years reading John Gribbin, Gary Zukav, Fritjov Kapra, and Freeman Dyson alongside her Einstein, treating their work as theology rather than background research. When the 1996 documentary asked her about the book, she named the method directly.
When I wrote A Wrinkle in Time, it was for me a theological enterprise. And I really thought I had done something good. [paraphrased from audio]
The rejections ran to somewhere between 25 and 40 editors, a count L’Engle revised across different interviews. Two separate publishers offered to accept the manuscript on condition that she remove the problem of evil. She turned both down. Years later, in a 1983 lecture at the Library of Congress, she articulated the principle she had been living by.
I will rewrite for months or even years for an editor who sees what I am trying to do in this book and wants to make it better and stronger. But I will not, I cannot diminish and mutilate it for an editor who does not understand it and wants to weaken it.
When the manuscript finally found a home at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, L’Engle had been working under a title she knew wasn’t right. Publishers had been indifferent to the name she’d been using. The solution arrived at breakfast, from an unexpected quarter.
I didn’t know you’re not supposed to have a female protagonist in a space story. I’m female, why wouldn’t I have a female protagonist? I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to mention evil in a book that was going to be marketed for kids. [paraphrased from audio]
The title itself came from her mother, who was visiting, hadn’t slept well, and announced over morning coffee that she thought she had it: A Wrinkle in Time, right out of the text. L’Engle’s response was immediate. Her classification of what she had written remained equally unambiguous: she insisted it was not a children’s book, not a Christian book, and not a genre novel.
The personal thread
The outsider who became the protagonistThe book was also a confession about what kind of writer she was willing to be. Editors had twice offered publication in exchange for softening the manuscript’s darkest concerns, and both times she declined. Reflecting on what her fiction was actually for, she arrived at a formulation that went beyond craft.
I’m not a children’s writer. I’m not a Christian writer. I resist and reject that kind of classification. I’m a writer period. People underestimate children. They think you have to write differently. You don’t. You just have to tell a story.
Alongside the refusal to be categorized sat an older, harder-won knowledge about what stories are for. The question she first tried to answer at age five, when her father was dying and she had no words for it, never left her. By the time she articulated it in her journal in 1960, it had become the book’s emotional spine.
This is my psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.
On what’s at stake
The muffin tin and the banned bookThe planet Camazotz, where IT abolishes individual thought and enforces total conformity, was not an abstract dystopia. L’Engle had a precise name for the real-world force she was writing against, and she deployed it with the specificity of someone who had watched it operate.
There are forces working in the world as never before in history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.
When the book started appearing on banned-book lists, L’Engle was puzzled at first, then angry. By 1995 she had worked out a coherent account of what the censorship effort was actually protecting.
I think there are some people who are terribly afraid… afraid that they cannot control or manipulate God, that God might love people they don’t love, that God’s love is too all-embracing, and that we don’t have to earn it. All we have to do is say we are sorry, and God throws a big party. That is frightening to some people. They seem to feel that they can’t be happy in heaven unless hell is heavily populated.
By 2001, after decades of controversy, she had moved through horror and anger to something drier. The comment she gave the New York Times that year was quoted in Teachers and Writers Magazine.
It seems people are willing to damn the book without reading it. Nonsense about witchcraft and fantasy. First I felt horror, then anger, and finally I said, ‘Ah, the hell with it.’ It’s great publicity, really.
What she wants us to sit with
Questions without answers, children without armorThe editors who rejected the manuscript worried the problem of evil was too much for young readers. L’Engle’s position was the opposite: children who are shielded from darkness arrive at adulthood with no resources for it. The argument she made in a 1970 interview at the Free Library of Philadelphia was not gentle.
Well, there is evil in the world, and we’ve got to fight it. And if you protect children entirely from the fact that there is death, that there is evil, that there are people who hate, that there are people who would like to hurt them, they have no weapons and they’re going to grow up incapable of loving. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s refusal to resolve everything cleanly was also intentional. In a 1997 interview, she identified the quality she was most trying to protect, the one publishers had most wanted her to soften.
The questions are important. And a lot of the good questions don’t have answers, certainly not now. [paraphrased from audio]
After the years of rejection, the controversy, and the eventual success, one thing surprised her most. She had written the book in 1960 in a specific place, in a specific crisis of faith and family. The discovery that it had outlasted those circumstances was something she could not have planned for.
The thing that’s really very exciting is to know that it’s not limited to the time I wrote it, it has a more universal quality. You can never know that when you write something.