Conversations with Madeleine L'Engle

By Jackie C. Horne

Conversations with Madeleine L’Engle is the first collection of interviews with the beloved children’s book author best known for her 1962 Newbery Award–winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. However, Madeleine L’Engle's accomplishments as a writer spread far beyond children’s literature. Beginning her career as a literary novelist for adults, L’Engle (1918–2007) continued to write fiction for both young and old long after A Wrinkle in Time. In her sixties, she published personal memoirs and devotional texts that explored her relationship with religion. At the time of her death, L’Engle was mourned by fans of her children’s books and the larger Christian community.

L’Engle’s books, as well as her life, were often marked by contradictions. A consummate storyteller, L’Engle carefully crafted and performed a public self-image via her interviews. Weaving through the documentable facts in these interviews are partial lies, misdirections, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. But, when read against her fictions, these “truths” can help us see L’Engle more deeply—what she wanted for herself and for her children, what she believed about good and evil, and what she thought was the right way and the wrong way to be a family—than if she had been able to articulate the truth more directly.

The thirteen interviews collected here reveal an amazing feat of authorial self-fashioning, as L’Engle transformed from novelist to children’s author to Christian writer and attempted to craft a public persona that would speak to each of these different audiences in meaningful, yet not painfully revealing, ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Dec 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496819857

Book preview

Madeleine L’Engle

Roy Newquist / 1967

From Conversations …, 1967, pp. 230–43.

We’re afraid to say what we really want to say. We’re afraid to communicate because by doing so we become vulnerable … take off your armor, do violence to jargon and platitudes and make yourself vulnerable. Talk and write about the things that matter, even if people think you’re silly. This is the only thing that will give language back its dignity and joy.

L’Engle: My husband claims that I’ve used my early life in so many books that I no longer know fact from fiction, so I’ll have to admit that I may have things somewhat confused. Yet what I’ll say is more or less true.

I was born shortly after the First World War. My father was a foreign correspondent and a writer of all sorts. He was gassed during the war, so I never knew him as the volatile, fascinating, attractive person he must have been. I saw him dying for eighteen years; the gas just went on eating. My mother had studied to be a pianist until she married, and for a while, when we lived in New York, my father was drama and music critic for the Herald-Evening Sun. The house was full of peculiar people.

I always wanted to write, but I wasn’t encouraged at home because my father was a writer. (I certainly would not encourage my children to write. None of them show any tendency to do so, thank God.) My early teachers didn’t encourage me to write either.

I was well into adolescence when I started really doing something about writing. This was when I attended a perfectly ghastly school. I was quite lame, and at this school they placed a tremendous emphasis on prowess in the gym. It was also faintly social. A really repulsive New York–type school. I remember coming home and saying, All right, so I’m the unpopular one, and I began a life purely of the imagination. I wrote to keep myself company, to make myself happy. The homeroom teacher went along with the kids in labeling me the lame and unpopular one, and she also decided I wasn’t very bright. Her name was Miss Pepper or Miss Salt, I forget which, and she was dreadful. I probably didn’t change her opinion by the way I didn’t study. The last year I was there they had a poetry contest in the spring that was to be judged by the head of the English department. The submissions went right to her without screening; otherwise, I wouldn’t have had an entry. I won it, and there was great sound and fury because my homeroom teacher said, Madeleine isn’t bright. She couldn’t have written that poem; she must have copied it. So my mother had to go to school with the mass of poems, novels, and stories I’d written, and they finally had to allow that I probably had written the winning