Nevertheless, she continued writing, and while a 1950s housewife, managed a wholly original creation: A Wrinkle in Time was both different from anything she’d ever written and distinct from anything by any author. This masterwork came after a time when she doubted herself both as a writer (since her works weren’t selling) and as a homemaker, with fifties expectations of domestic perfection dogging her. During her crisis, a minister advised her to read religious tomes, but they only bored her; eventually, though, she found herself reinspired by physics. Reading Heisenberg, Einstein, and Planck, she found herself recalling her earliest memory: seeing the starry sky by the seashore one magically clear night as a tiny child. She found a mysticism within these contemplations of natural law and the beauty of creation, and in the writings that followed, repeatedly expressed this joining of scientific knowledge with the realm of the spiritual.
L’Engle’s journals of the years previous to her breakthrough novel reflect its themes, from pondering her own shortcomings to the implications of relativity. She created a tale of the daughter of an unusual and creative family, with a father who had been torn from her and teachers who underestimated her, confronting an evil that controlled people by convincing them that not conforming was the problem. She eloquently expressed the interconnectedness of all things in her engaging work.
But editors didn’t think there was a market for the hard-to-categorize novel, and it took two years before L’Engle found a publisher who’d take a chance on it, with dozens of rejection slips on the way there. She inwardly reflected, “I know [this] is a good book.…. This is my psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.” In 1962, it at last saw print; though well reviewed, conservative evangelicals claimed it promoted witchcraft and ‘New Age’ spirituality and tried to have it removed from school libraries and Christian bookstores. L’Engle was disappointed that her book and its four sequels were targeted as controversial, since evangelicals had no problem with the popular Narnia series. A Wrinkle in Time now holds the contrasting distinctions of being one of the most banned American novels, as well as selling over sixteen million copies (and counting) in more than forty languages and winning the prestigious 1963 Newbery Medal.
Its success changed her life; the family, now including three children, moved to an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, keeping Crosswicks as a refuge for time away from the city. Madeleine volunteered as a church librarian, establishing a daily routine of work, worship, and writing accompanied by her Irish setters, and her husband Hugh returned to acting. She went on to write more than two dozen more books, as well as giving back to her community by on occasion giving free workshops on the writer’s craft, at times with author friends, at the Episcopal cathedral where she did volunteer work. L’Engle joined the rarified list of writers who are not only recognized as literary rock stars while still alive, but live long enough to enjoy it. In the four decades that followed, she was able to watch as the series that began with A Wrinkle in Time inspired young people, particularly girls, and positively shifted the landscape for both novels with female protagonists and female writers of speculative fiction. During those years, her fan base mushroomed as she achieved further recognition: a National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, no less than seventeen honorary doctorates, and much more, including a 2018 major motion picture film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time.
In 1970, Hugh, who had acted in series including Dark Shadows, found career success when he was cast as Dr. Charles Tyler in the pilot of All My Children, where he continued for thirteen years. He was often buttonholed by autograph-seeking fans when in public, which amused his less-recognizable wife.
In later life, L’Engle traveled extensively, appearing at schools and colleges, literary festivals, religious conferences, retreats, particularly women’s retreats, and doing children’s book tours. She was a charismatic speaker who employed her theater background to good effect, even using props. Even after her husband’s 1986 demise, she kept on with writing, speaking, and literary events as well as socializing with friends and family well beyond the milestone of turning eighty, until her death in 2007.
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.
Madeleine L’Engle
Mystics and Madwomen
Subversive Piety
It’s amazing that most of the women profiled in this chapter weren’t burned at the stake! They are kindred of the “first ladies of literature” in spirit, if not in soul. They were writing at a time when it simply wasn’t seemly for women to express independent thought, to reinterpret the Bible in their own ways, or really, to be writing at all. Most fascinating of all is the one recurring theme in many of their mystic revelations: the feminine face of God, or “God as mother.” Despite decades and sometimes centuries separating these disparate mystics, their visions and revelations were similar in detail and description of a shining, goddess-like benevolent figure. Writing is a solitary venture, and these women have been the most solitary of all: anchorites imprisoned in monastic cells; spinsters in rooms of their own à la Emily Dickinson; pioneer wives stuck in remote parts of the rough-hewn New World; and faithfuls on pilgrimages through the most inhospitable of surroundings and circumstances. Their texts and tracts read like modern poetry—simple, spare, passionate, and beatific, in the original meaning as appropriated by the twentieth-century Beatniks.
Forward-thinking if nothing else, these women wielded their pens skillfully, unencumbered by fear of their fellow man. Saint Catherine of Siena’s dictated writings and the letters she sent to prominent men of the day influenced the politics of the medieval church, while Hilda of Whitby mentored the greatest Old English poet, Caedmon. At age fifteen, neo-Gnostic Jane Lead began having visions of Sophia, “the magical woman within the soul who would bring redemption to male and female spirits alike.” Indian poet-singer Mirabai became a wandering sadhu for her devotion to Lord Krishna, composing verse of unmatched beauty that is still sung four hundred years later. These transcendental talents are, in some cases, only now finding a readership, thanks to students of women’s literature and religious scholars. Superstar Sufi poet Rumi may have to make room for these ecstatic lyricists. After all, these women, too, were divinely inspired to write.
HILDA OF WHITBY patron saint
An Englishwoman born in 614 CE, Hilda spent most of her life teaching and creating a network of monasteries and abbeys across England. In 657, a patron gave her a piece of land in Whitby, Yorkshire, on which she established a monastery that would come to be an important breeding ground for the developing scholarship and literature of the age. Populated by both men and women who lived separately, Whitby attracted a wide group of intellectuals. Hilda herself taught the arts, medicine, grammar, music, and theology.
Old English historian the Venerable Bede writes about Hilda and her crucial role as advisor to kings, noblemen, and laypeople. But she also had a lasting effect on the world of letters. Whitby had a large library, and the scribes of the monastery produced the Life of Pope Gregory I, one of England’s earliest works of literature. Bede also tells of how the infinitely wise Abbess Hilda discovered the poetic potential of Caedmon, a lay brother who worked at the monastery, and encouraged him to write. As a result of her patronage, we have the earliest known examples of Christian poetry in Old English.
Originally a Celtic Christian, Hilda hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664, which was held to decide what direction Christianity would take. The synod voted to follow the Roman Catholic Church; independent though she was, Hilda went with the majority.
While