Madeleine L’Engle’s writing takes readers on imaginative, harrowing adventures that blend science fiction and fantasy elements with heartful insights into approachable themes about family, love, learning, fear, and faith. Learn more about the impactful writer of A Wrinkle in Time and the life lessons she learned, and shared with the world, about the literary arts.
“I am grateful that I started writing at a very early age, before I realized what a daring thing it is to do, to set down words on paper, to attempt to tell a story, create characters. We have to be braver than we think we can be...” —Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was born Madeleine L’Engle Camp on November 29, 1918, in New York City. Her parents were artists themselves: her mother, Madeleine “Mado” Hall Barnett, was a pianist; and her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer (known for mystery stories) and journalist. The latest in a line of Madeleines, L’Engle was named specifically after her great-grandmother, Madeleine Margaret L’Engle.
Madeleine’s parents had been married for 12 years before Madeleine was born, and their artistic talents and reputations allowed them to do things like travel the world, enjoy social circles, and attend art performances. An only child, Madeleine was empathetic to her parents adjusting their lifestyles to take care of their now three-person family. They balanced their loving care for her (she sometimes felt overprotected) with enjoying their grownup hobbies and interests (like going to the opera or hosting dinners with their adult friends) and dealing with adult anxieties about the changing world around them (more on that below). If she wasn’t in school, or if her parents were doing their own things, Madeleine was on her own—and that could be quite lonely.
So, Madeleine dealt with moments of loneliness by surrounding herself with stories. When she wasn’t reading whatever books were available at home, she was creating new stories and poetry of her own. She penned her first story when she was five years old and started keeping a personal journal when she was eight years old. And Madeleine’s parents encouraged her engagement with the arts. She took art and piano lessons starting in elementary school, and she continued to enjoy playing the piano throughout her life (the piano sometimes helped her with writer’s block). Her father gave her his old typewriter when she was ten years old, which she would use into adulthood.
Listen to Madeleine revisit the importance of writing during her childhood and see footage of her younger self with her family.
Madeleine L’Engle Childhood Footage
Recovered footage of a young Madeleine L’Engle with audio of her describing her childhood.
“The reasonable, peaceful world in which my parents grew up, the world which was far too civilized for war, was broken forever by the horror of World War I. My father went to fight in the war to end war, and for the rest of his life he had to live with the knowledge that not only had his war not ended war, it was the beginning of a century of near-total war.”
A photo of female workers on the Great Northern Railway in Great Falls, Montana, ca. 1918. Women replaced men across different industries due to vacancies caused by World War I enlistment. Photo comes from the Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, courtesy of the holdings of the National Archives.
During World War I (1914-1918), Charles traveled to France and Ireland as a foreign correspondent to cover events for magazine articles. Once the U.S. entered the war in 1917, however, he enlisted in the army and went to France as a soldier (he was deployed when Madeleine was born). One of the scary things he encountered during the war was the use of mustard gas, a new weapon that could cause a range of injuries and lead to death. Charles completed his military service, but exposure to the gas caused long-term lung damage for the rest of his life; and Madeleine developed her own anxieties about the dangers of war by seeing how its effects impacted her family. (Her granddaughters account in their biography of her, Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of A Wrinkle in Time By Her Granddaughters, that, “When describing her father, Madeleine recalled that he was horrified and repelled by the destruction and devastation he had witnessed.”)
A photo of people outside of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after the 1929 stock market crash. Photograph originally by Pacific & Atlantic Photos, Inc. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
On October 29, 1929, the United States’ stock market crashed on what became known as “Black Tuesday.” This event gravely hurt people’s finances and the American economy overall, and it started the Great Depression. Around this time, Charles’s physical and mental health made it challenging for him to write professionally and support the family, and concern for Charles increased after he had pneumonia. So, the Camp family moved to Switzerland—where the cleaner, natural air (compared to New York City’s air quality) might help his breathing, and the cost of living would be more affordable.
To learn more about art and artists influenced by the Great Depression:
“All artists reflect the time in which they live, but whether or not their work also has that universality which lives in any generation or culture is nothing we can know for many years.”
School wasn’t easy for Madeleine as a child. When she changed New York schools in the fourth grade, she struggled with her classmates and teachers who criticized her for being disorganized, not particularly athletic, and quite shy. She felt picked on unfairly by people who didn’t really know her; in the fifth grade, a teacher accused her of plagiarizing a poem she entered in a contest—and won—because of how well-written it was. These labels can understandably impact someone’s sense of self, making them feel insecure, angry, frustrated, or sad. Writing, reading, and journaling helped Madeleine ground herself. Her favorite book as a child was Louise Maude Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon. She found several similarities between herself and main character Emily—from living on islands to having fathers with ailing health conditions.
Madeleine was 12 years old when the Camps moved abroad for her father’s health. While her mother was fine with her attending local schools, her father really wanted a formal education for her. So, Madeleine was enrolled at Châtelard in Montreux, Switzerland—a strict boarding school that would be a hit-and-miss experience she attended for three years. Châtelard’s rules “gave Madeleine a lifelong antipathy to bureaucracy and automation,” which readers might recognize in the conformity and rule-abiding strictness at Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time. Châtelard’s students were rarely given privacy and had to obey strict rules at all hours of the day. So, Madeleine used her imagination to escape her surroundings, honing the ability to write anywhere she needed to, regardless of how restrictive the environment felt (and regardless of whether she got in trouble for it).
A photo of Madeleine L’Engle taken circa 1932 while she lived in Switzerland. Photo © Crosswicks, Ltd.
By 1933, when Madeleine was in ninth grade, another series of global and personal events impacted the Camp family. Adolf Hitler, who later became a destructive and dictatorial leader in Germany responsible for countless atrocities, was rising to power, causing a growing political intensity in Europe. The Great Depression in the United States continued to hurt American citizens as well as have ripple effects beyond its borders. And the Camps were witnessing these major events as Americans living abroad in Switzerland, a country that borders Germany. The family finally decided to return stateside in the summer of 1933 upon learning that Madeleine’s grandmother (nicknamed Dearma) was sick in Jacksonville, Florida.
In the fall of 1933, Madeleine was sent to Ashley Hall, a boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina, while her parents remained in Florida to be close to Dearma. Compared to her experiences at Châtelard, Madeleine had a more enjoyable social and creative life at Ashley Hall. Her grades still depended on the subject—she remained stronger in language arts and was challenged in math and science—but she made close friends. She joined the drama club and both performed and wrote new works for the club. She participated in the school’s student council, which gave her leadership responsibilities. She attended summer camp and spent time back in Florida with her parents and their extended family. Sadly, Dearma died right before Madeleine returned for her second year at Ashley Hall. Madeleine journaled about her grief, “I feel as though my feelings were all bottled up inside me, and I can’t take the cork out. I wish I could. It would be such a relief if I could just write everything out… And I read in another book that a person is never dead until you have forgotten them, so Dearma can never be dead to me, because I will never forget her.” She kept writing and sought opportunities to stretch and improve her style. This included being the assistant editor of the school’s literary magazine; submitting poetry to magazines (and dealing with rejection letters when they came); and sending her work to her parents for their thoughts.
During the start of her senior year, she learned that her father was hospitalized with pneumonia. And sadly, he died on October 30, 1936. The sudden loss was difficult with the complexities that grief causes, and it was a significant moment in her transition from high school teenager to young adult. She processed, if not channeled, her feelings into elevated aspirations to write professionally, inspired by her father’s own writer identity and his support for her. Madeleine debated whether she should consider college when her mother was now by herself. Yet the impact of her grandmother’s and father’s deaths propelled her forward and she applied to school. She committed herself to the idea of college once she was accepted (and would do her best to write to her mother regularly while away).
A photo taken in 1904 of the College Hall building at Smith College. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.
Madeleine attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, an all-women’s college where she majored in English (Shakespeare and 17th-century literature classes taught by professor Esther Cloudman Dunn are credited with positively helping her fiction-writing skills). Outside of coursework, she participated in student publications as a writer and editor. She also wrote plays, which were sometimes adaptations of short stories based on her experiences, and acted in the college theater department—which is where she met friend Marie Donnet. The two would head to New York City following graduation—Madeleine to focus on fiction writing and playwrighting, Marie to focus on acting. The time came in 1941 after Madeleine graduated cum laude (Latin for “with praise” or “with honor,” it means she was in the top 20-30% of her class). (She would later receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the college in 1986.)
With new independence (despite her mother’s worries of being so far from each other) and her feminist perspective, young adult Madeleine moved to New York. She worked as an actor and a stage manager while submitting short works to various publications. Real world events anxiously framed her periphery—the United States entered WWII in December 1941 (marked by the attack at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 7), bringing tensions abroad into sharper focus at home. So along with her involvement in the New York theater scene, she performed civilian duties such as getting health and safety training provided by the Red Cross and selling war bonds at plays through the American Theatre Wing program. All the while, she ambitiously pursued opportunities to elevate herself into creative roles, especially through determined attempts to get her plays read by Eva Le Gallienne, a legendary actor, director, and producer with whom Madeleine wanted to work. Her efforts proved successful, and Madeleine’s career grew as she became an apprentice under Le Gallienne and partner Margaret Webster’s theater company, which would lead to more life changes.
“We write out of our own experience, and my experience is that which springs from being a wife and a mother and from my struggles to be human under these particular circumstances. Certainly I could not have written about the Murrys or the Austins without my own family experience.”
A photo of Madeleine L’Engle and Hugh Franklin. Photo © Crosswicks, Ltd.
Madeleine met her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, during a Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in 1944 that starred Le Gallienne. Madeleine was the assistant stage manager and an understudy of the touring show, and Hugh was in the cast. They married on January 26, 1946. Madeleine and Hugh decided to start a family and would have three children: daughter Josephine (born in 1947), son Bion (born in 1952), and daughter Maria (adopted when she was seven years old).
At first, Madeleine’s plan was to balance her time between parenting and writing. Her first novel, The Small Rain, was published in 1945 and was inspired by her boarding school experiences. Next came Ilsa in 1946. Her first children’s book, And Both Were Young, was published in 1949. Camilla Dickinson was published in 1951. The Franklin family relocated to Goshen, Connecticut, in 1952, where they moved into a farmhouse they would call Crosswicks; Hugh and Madeleine bought and ran a general store while raising the kids. Yet, Madeleine was overwhelmed in balancing the roles of being a mom, wife, and artist (as well as other roles like part-time store worker and community member—as an Episcopalian Christian, she attended church and acted as the choir director). She loved her family and cared a lot about her contributions to support it, and finding time to write while raising her children and being present with Hugh was hard. She feared she wasn’t spending enough quality time with them, and she felt guilty when her writing wasn’t providing financially to the household.
Madeleine’s ambitious nature set her apart from other women within her New England community and speaks to the changing American social landscape from when she was in college to the political conservatism of the 1950s. She had witnessed her father’s struggles as a writer, yet she also had the gendered challenges of pursuing paid writing as a woman surrounded by radical shifts in politics. Occupational opportunities for women were limited prior to WWII. Societal expectations were that women would get married, have children, and handle the family’s home economics while men supported the family financially by working a job (or multiple jobs). During WWII (1939-1945), many American women entered the workforce to fill jobs made vacant by men serving in the military and other war efforts. This need for American labor provided an empowering socio-economic independence for some women that was different from their usual domestic duties. Even though veterans sought to reclaim their jobs once the war ended, and women were encouraged to return to their households, some recognized that women could (and wanted to) occupy more than domestic roles. Madeleine wanted to occupy more than domestic roles by also embracing the artist she was. Otherwise, she could have skipped attending college and settled into starting a family earlier in her life. (Female college attendance was not as common in the 1930s as is it today. Access to a higher education was limited due to cost, especially after the Great Depression’s residual impact on families’ finances; and segregation based on sex and race, which caused barriers for students based on discriminating practices.) Madeleine chose to pave a creative career path on top of having a family, and it was a difficult task without any how-to guidance.
The “We Can Do It!” poster featuring “Rosie the Riveter” was designed by artist J. Howard Miller and published in 1942. Photo credit: Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
As a result, she would consider quitting writing several times. In fact, she postponed her writing career during the 1950s so she could focus on her kids. Madeleine had been a storyteller all her life, and she worked hard to reincorporate space for writing alongside her motherhood and wife identities. A Winter’s Love in 1957 was her publishing comeback. Things seemed to be turning around until publishing company rejections started chipping away at her confidence and determination. By her 40th birthday (in November 1958), Madeleine reconsidered giving up on writing when The Lost Innocent received another rejection letter. The ongoing difficulty of succeeding in paid writing work further exacerbated the “spasms of guilt” she felt with her artistry competing for time against her family life. She published what would become the beginning of her successful series Meet the Austins in 1960, which critics found innovative because of its approach of death for young adult audiences (it featured a girl adopted into a family after her biological parents’ deaths). But what next?
“Being a writer does not necessarily mean being published. It’s very nice to be published. It’s what you want. When you have a vision, you want to share it. But being a writer means writing.”
New ideas formed when the Camp family took a two-month camping trip across the U.S. in anticipation of Hugh restarting his acting career in New York. The trip included driving through the New Mexico border landscape of the Ute Indian reservation and Arizona’s Painted Desert. The vibrant geological aesthetics offered visual inspirations for the interdimensional journey on which Mrs Whatsit and company would take Meg Murry, Charles Wallace Murry, and Calvin O’Keefe.
A photo of the colorful rock formations of Arizona’s Painted Desert. Image “Arizona - Painted Desert - 4” by is licensed .
A Wrinkle in Time represented Madeleine’s first time creating a work of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) or science fantasy. Science fiction typically uses an imagined reality that expands from our everyday world to include extraordinary possibilities mixed with real or imagined sciences. Madeleine believed that “science fantasy is not far from fairy tale, that world which delves deep into the human psyche, struggling to find out at least a little more of what we are all about.” The story takes young people Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin on a fantastic adventure across time and space to rescue the missing Mr. Murry, a physicist and father whose scientific experiment lands him in cosmic danger. The journey requires the trio to meet unique beings, overcome threatening obstacles, and confront powers of evil that use conformity and illusions of rationality to control others. What strengthens the children’s resolves, especially main character Meg, are their capacities for love, empathy, critical thinking, and bravery.
The modern science in Wrinkle, including Madeleine’s famous use of the tesseract concept, stemmed from the author’s curiosity about quantum physics, which she picked up after picking up a book about Albert Einstein. Simultaneously, Wrinkle showcased an expression of Madeleine’s Christian faith—of wanting to believe in a higher power with limitless, indiscriminating love—alongside the importance of never being afraid to ask questions (which science does so well). Then she hit another roadblock. Although she completed A Wrinkle in Time in 1960, it wouldn’t be published until 1962. The book was rejected over 30 times for being so different from what publishers expected of children’s literature. It was finally well-received by John C. Farrar of the publishing company Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and the book was first published in 1962.
Watch Madeleine’s granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis talk about the origins for A Wrinkle in Time and the difficulty her grandmother experienced in the book’s many initial publishing rejections in this Library of America interview. (video duration: 02:01)
Madeleine wrote many books in her lifetime. Audiences across the ages may be most familiar with the Wrinkle in Time series: A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989). She argued against being categorized within only one genre since her writing spanned different classifications that included fantasy, science fiction, fiction, poetry, and memoirs. She resisted being labeled as only a children’s writer or as only a Christian writer; instead, she wrote the story that her imagination told her to write, and she wrote for a reader that could be anyone—young or old, regardless of religious affiliation. And Madeleine won several awards for her writing. These accolades include the John Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time (1963) and A Ring of Endless Light (1981); the 1980 National Book Award for Children’s Books (paperback) for A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978); the 1998 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the School Library Journal for her lifetime contribution to young adult writing; and the 2004 National Humanities Medal.
Throughout her older adult life, Madeleine did what she loved best (though she still had to juggle): spend time with family and friends, travel, and write. She was invited to give speeches and lectures across the country about her works and her life, and she enjoyed teaching classes and workshops on writing. She stayed connected with her mother, who would live with the family at Crosswicks the summer before she died in 1971. Madeleine and Hugh enjoyed forty years of marriage together until he died in 1986. Through these major losses and others, Madeleine remained strong in the combined importance of her faith and her love for words. Some of her writings reflect her coping with grief, such as The Summer of the Great-Grandmother memoir (1974) and other entries in The Crosswicks Journals. When she frequented New York later in life (her granddaughters lived with her there while they attended college), she was the choir director of her local congregational church, a teacher at St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School, and a volunteer librarian at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine—where she was also a writer-in-residence.
And, of course, she kept writing.
Madeleine L’Engle died on September 6, 2007, at the age of 89 in Litchfield, Connecticut.
“…I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.”
Writer
Tiffany A. Bryant
Content Editor
Eric Friedman
References
Updated
November 9, 2021
Madeleine L’Engle remains best-known for her “Wrinkle in Time” Trilogy (or “Time” Quintet). Learn how different types of art played a role in her writing and discover some of her habits that may help you expand your own writing.
In this 6-8 lesson, students will explore the intersection of science fiction and fantasy from the works of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time Trilogy. Students will create an original character, thing, ability, and/or place using worldbuilding elements. Students will choose between dramatizing, making a book trailer, or creating an illustration to introduce their imaginary world.
How do fables and myths explain the unknown and preserve cultures? What makes a good story? How do plays comment on societal issues? Grab a pencil and prepare to create original poems, experience the Civil War through letters, and parse symbolism and metaphor in this exploration of language arts.
Explore how art influences the scientific world (and the science behind the art). Learn about the lives of butterflies through dance, use mobiles to recreate the solar system, and discover the colorful world pulsing inside our own cells.
From providing historical inspiration to preserving cultural traditions to pushing the boundaries of creativity, explore the contributions women have made (and continue to make) to the arts.
Lois Lowry, two-time Newbery Medalist (Number the Stars and The Giver), shares her inspiration for writing, the universal themes in her stories that deal with human connections—and how she translates her ideas to the page.
Carole Boston Weatherford shares her unique talent of making music with the language of poetry and talks about developing her own voice as both a poet and author through the celebration of family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles.
Katherine Paterson shares her experiences growing up the daughter of missionaries in China, her love of books and authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein and also reads several selections from her time-honored books.
