Madeleined L"Engles

Far from being satisfied with the settled, comfortable existence of an affluent and artistic household or with the benefits of being married to a successful actor, Madeleine L'Engle applied and built on the many advantages into which she was born to the project of her own artistic and professional development. An award-winning writer of children's books, including A Wrinkle in Time, which was published in 1962 and won the Newbery Medal in 1963, and which served as the touchstone for three sequels that shaped the rest of what has been described as the Time Quartet (Estes 1620), L'Engle now divides her time between writing and lecturing, holding the post of writer-in-residence and librarian at the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City (Collection).

As a writer of books that by and large are marketed for young people, L'Engle takes as her principal thematic concern a realistic picture of the restorative and protective--though not perfect--powers embedded in home and family life. L'Engle's moral and social values are Christian, with special affinity for the traditions of the High Church of England (Collection). Yet they are not evangelically sectarian, which is to say that the focus is on the social norms of the nurturant and healing rather than rigid and prescriptive versions of Christianity in the modern world. By the same token L'Engle is not overwhelmingly preoccupied with religion per se, except in regard to reflecting its ideal values. In

e Madeleine L'Engle Collection, she explains that she met her husband Hugh Franklin during a production of The Cherry Orchard (Collection). At the request of Franklin, an actor, she relinquished her Equity card. In 1952, they made their home in rural Connecticut, becoming proprietors of a general store there for some years. L'Engle cites the difficulties of time management for a writer drawn into civic and church affairs as well as the project of building a successful business. "However I did manage to write at night," she says (Collection). L'Engle and her husband eventually sold the store and relocated to New York, as Franklin resumed an acting career in television that lasted until his death in 1986. L'Engle's determination to have her books published has been cited by a number of sources. In retrospect, L'Engle attributes that to a subject matter thought to be most unusual for stories with children as the protagonist. She spent two years attempting to find a publisher for Meet the Austins, published in 1961; a difficulty there was the fact that the story begins with a death, something of a taboo for children's stories at the time (Estes 1621). More than 20 publishing houses rejected A Wrinkle in Time, which was finally accep

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