Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007): Her Work Will Stand the Test of Time
Categories: In the News , Award Winners , Children's Books
I was one of those kids who left the library each week with a new stack of books, getting carsick on the way home because I couldn't wait to start reading. From Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden to C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, my childhood books usually involved misfits and hidden worlds of one kind or another.
Madeleine L'Engle passed away last week at the age of 88. She wrote more than two-dozen works of fiction as well as volumes of poetry and non-fiction.
After I read about L'Engle's death, I immediately retrieved our copy of her most celebrated book, A Wrinkle in Time. This book has some of my favorite misfits and hidden worlds. Meg is a high school student (or junior high? We're never given an exact age) who never seems to work to her potential. She wears glasses and braces and is belligerent toward adults and other students alike. Charles Wallace, Megs brother, didn't start talking until he was four; he now speaks, at age five, in complete sentences with perfect diction. Calvin is one of the popular kids in high school, but only because he pretends. The three of them--with help from Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which--embark on a journey through time and space to find Meg and Charles Wallace's father.
In her 1963 speech accepting the Newbery Award, Madeleine L'Engle talked about the responsibility of children's book authors to expand the imagination of young people: "Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity." She went on to say that "[v]ery few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it's their own world, the world of their daily life, and it's our loss that so many of us grow out of it."
Rereading A Wrinkle in Time I couldn't help feeling pangs of nostalgia for that "world of the imagination" that blurred the lines between what was possible and what wasn't. I remember checking the back of all my closets for entrances to Narnia, creating my own Teribithia, and believing that all mice were really little boys, transformed by witches.
L'Engle concluded her acceptance speech with this line: "A book, too, can be a star, 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'; a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe." What a wonderful legacy to have left.
