RIP: Madeleine L’Engle

Posted on 9/10/2007 by chris

Author of perhaps the only great novel that actually begins “it was a dark and stormy night,” Madeleine L’Engle has died. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that I owe a significant portion of the good things in my life– and a number of lifelong obsessions– to the cornerstone experience of reading A Wrinkle in Time.

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2 Responses to RIP: Madeleine L’Engle

  1. Gardner says:
    9/10/2007 at 8:01 am

    Reading that book was a cornerstone experience for me as well. It combined several of my favorite things in a way that reinforced them all:

    1. Language-play (I loved the three sisters for that reason, at least)
    2. Misunderstood smart person theme (’nuff said)
    3. Centrality of family
    4. Centrality of love
    5. Mental-power matter-transfer SF element
    6. Fascinating other planets
    7. Talismans, gifts
    8. Battle between, well, not so much good and evil (it was that, too) as between soullessness and love
    9. Love conquers all, and heroic love-vessels are the champions of the universe

    I wish I could tesseract. I also wish I could love better.

    Thanks for this note, Chris.

  2. beau says:
    9/11/2007 at 6:09 am

    I was thinking about that “dark and stormy night” bit the other day when I picked up “Wrinkle,” thinking to read it to my beloved now that there’s no more Harry Potter. Getting published at all with that opening is pretty amazing.

    There’s a colorable argument that L’Engle’s “Aunt Thing” was inspired by Heinlein’s “Mother Beast” in “Have Space Suit Will Travel.” H also wrote the first tesseract story of which I’m aware, a short called, “He Built a Crooked House.”

    Gosh, I actually used to read fiction…