The Greatest Love of All CONFRONTING CONFORMITY IN A WRINKLE IN TIME
Madeleine L’Engle wrote A Wrinkle in Time from 1959 to 1960. From when she finished her manuscript, this beloved book was always destined for an unconventional path, one that broke with what had been done before. L’Engle was a writer of mainly young adult fiction since making her debut in 1945 with the semi-autobiographical The Small Rain, focusing on fractured families and recurring characters. But while L’Engle’s protagonists had been engaged in science before, A Wrinkle in Time was her first book explicitly about it, conceived while she was reading about quantum physics on a ten-week-long camping trip. It doesn’t talk down to its pre-teen audience, whether through its densely descriptive prose, extensive exploration of Christian and philosophical themes or use of scientific terms. In an afterword commissioned for the novel's fiftieth anniversary, L’Engle’s granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis recounts that the author ‘did not sit down to write a “children’s book” or a “fantasy novel” – she wrote to please herself’. Publishers considered its intended audience to be unclear – ‘It’s something between an adult and juvenile novel,’ one remarked – and L’Engle was pressured ‘to make the book more accessible so children could understand it, to change the plot, change the characters, change the book entirely’. Basically, as Voiklis puts it, ‘The story didn’t quite fit into any of the usual categories.’
These were the inevitable questions to be asked not only when working out what shelf in a bookstore on which to place the novel (which was eventually released in 1962), but also in adapting the novel to screen. For adaptation – an attempt to accurately visualise what exists in one’s imagination, accounting for political, social and time-bound contexts (among others) – is an act of pigeonholing and interpretation. When adapting a work, it
