Madeleine L’Engle, 88, requiescat in pace

Just saw this in The New York Times:

Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

I greatly enjoyed A Wrinkle In Time as a 10 or 11-year-old, and remember reading several other L'Engle books, including The Arms of the Starfish and, as an adult, Walking On Water: Reflections On Faith and Art, which I think introduced me to both Dorothy Sayers and E.M. Forster. Once in a while in recent years I'd see quotes by L'Engle about her beliefs—she was Anglican—and they sometimes sounded a bit squishy. But perhaps I'm being a bit of what she called "Fundalets", as in this 2006 interview:

So to you, faith is not a comfort?

Good heavens, no. It’s a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn’t an accident.

Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.

Then they’re not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.

Have you read the Harry Potter books?

I read one of them. It’s a nice story but there’s nothing underneath it. I don’t want to be bothered with stuff where there’s nothing underneath. Some people say, “Why do you read the Bible?’’ I say, "Because there’s a lot of stuff underneath."

I ask about the Potter books because, like “Wrinkle,” they have Christian themes yet have been criticized by some Christians, for similar reasons.

Well, the Fundalets [fundamentalist Christians] want a closed system, and I want an open system.

Open to truth, I take it. May she, a very fine writer, rest in peace.

Comments

[Nick Milne]

Our fourth-grade teacher read A Wrinkle in Time to us over the course of a few weeks. It was captivating.

I just saw a used copy of something she wrote about Genesis in the store the other day; it may have been a collection of short novels, but I don't remember exactly. I didn't get it, though. Maybe I will.

[Jeannine]

I read A Wrinkle in Time as a child, and it meant a great deal to me, partly because I was a mousy brunette whose hair would never curl right on both sides and because I was picked on a lot, just like Meg, the heroine. I was an adult when I finally found a copy of L'Engle's Meet the Austins, a wonderful book about family life. I love it more every time I read it. I think she wrote her best novels in the sixties, when she herself was raising her children, but even the later novels had glimpses of the insight that made her stories powerful.