Madeleine L'Engle Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Madeleine L Engle was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of Charles Wadsworth Camp, a writer and journalist, and Madeleine Hall Barnett, a pianist. Her parents artistic vocations and her fathers fragile health after World War I created a household where books, music, and conversation were daily fare, but also where frequent moves and illness made stability elusive. A shy, observant child, she filled notebooks with stories, poems, and reflections, forming habits of discipline and curiosity that shaped her lifelong working life. She attended a succession of schools, including boarding schools, and read deeply in both literature and science. After secondary school she enrolled at Smith College, where she studied English, acted in plays, and wrote steadily; she graduated in 1941, leaving with both a degree and a conviction that writing would be the axis of her life.

Stage, First Novels, and Marriage
After college she returned to New York, splitting her time between the literary and theatrical worlds. She worked as an actress, used the rhythms of rehearsal and performance to sharpen her ear for dialogue, and continued to send out manuscripts. Her first novels, including The Small Rain and Ilsa, appeared in the mid 1940s and announced an emerging voice attentive to inner lives and questions of vocation. In the theater she met Hugh Franklin, an actor whose craft and steadiness matched her own artistic seriousness. They married in 1946, beginning a partnership that would span four decades, shape a household, and root her writing in the daily work of love and responsibility.

Family, Connecticut, and the Crosswicks Years
Seeking a life that balanced art and family, Madeleine L Engle and Hugh Franklin moved to rural Connecticut, settling in an old farmhouse they called Crosswicks. They raised three children there: Josephine, Bion, and Maria, the last adopted after the death of a family friend. The family also ran a small general store in their village for several years, a venture that demanded long hours and taught practical lessons about community and perseverance. Between chores, parenting, and bookkeeping, she wrote in the interstices of the day. Approaching forty, she made a personal commitment to write daily regardless of results, a resolve that carried her through a difficult stretch of rejections and clarified the kind of stories she wanted to tell. Her Crosswicks journals later distilled these years into meditations on craft, family, and grace.

A Wrinkle in Time and the Time Quintet
The breakthrough came with A Wrinkle in Time, a novel that fused family feeling, scientific imagination, and spiritual hunger into an adventure for young readers. After many rejections, it was published in the early 1960s and soon received the Newbery Medal, bringing her international attention. The books central figures Meg Murry, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O Keefe, guided by the mysterious Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which, offered readers a way to think about courage, love, and the fight against darkness. She extended the story world into a larger sequence often called the Time Quintet, including A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. The sequence knit together tesseracts and mitochondria, rune like poetry and ordinary household loyalties, a testament to her conviction that science and faith, logic and wonder, could inhabit the same imaginative universe.

The Austins, the O Keefes, and Other Fiction
Alongside the Murry books, L Engle wrote the Austin family novels, among them Meet the Austins, The Moon by Night, and A Ring of Endless Light, which received a Newbery Honor. These books followed a different family as they navigated adolescence, ethics, and vocation in settings ranging from small towns to New York City. A connected group of novels traced the O Keefe family, exploring consequences of choices first glimpsed in the Time books; titles such as The Arm of the Starfish, Dragons in the Waters, and A House Like a Lotus linked coming of age with moral risk. She also maintained an adult fiction strand, returning to characters across decades in works like The Small Rain and A Severed Wasp, refusing to fence off questions of art, marriage, aging, and forgiveness from the fabric of story.

Faith, Inquiry, and the Cathedral Years
L Engle was an Episcopalian whose work took religious experience seriously without reducing it to program or slogan. She read widely in theology and science and insisted that truth is not threatened by honest inquiry. In New York she found a vocational home at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, where she served for many years as a librarian and writer in residence. The Cathedral community which included clergy, artists, and children in the chorister and school programs became a circle of colleagues and friends who shaped her daily routines and gave her both audience and conversation. She taught workshops, mentored young writers, and chaired reading groups, carrying the same hospitable rigor she brought to the page into public life. Her nonfiction included Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art and the Crosswicks Journals A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two Part Invention, the last a portrait of her marriage to Hugh Franklin and a meditation on love and loss during his final illness.

Public Reception, Controversy, and Awards
With success came debate. Some readers embraced her blend of physics, fairy tale, and prayer, while others challenged her books in schools and libraries for precisely that mix. She answered controversy with patient explanation and more writing, arguing that stories are laboratories of empathy and truth. Honors accumulated over the years: the Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time, additional Newbery recognition for later work, and numerous lifetime and regional awards from literary and library organizations. Even with the public acclaim, she kept the rhythms of an ordinary working writer drafts, revisions, readings, and the constant exchange with editors and publishers who championed her voice.

Later Years and Legacy
In later decades she divided her time between Connecticut and New York, especially when Hugh Franklin took a long running role on television, which brought the family back to the city. After his death in the 1980s, she continued to write, speak, and travel, remaining a visible presence at the Cathedral and at conferences. She endured periods of ill health but kept working, revisiting old characters and themes while encouraging younger authors who sought her counsel. She died in 2007 in Connecticut, mourned by family, friends, colleagues, and generations of readers.

Madeleine L Engle left a body of work that treats intelligence and compassion as allied forces. Through the companionship of people closest to her her parents, whose crafts opened the arts to her; her husband, whose partnership steadied her; her children, who tested and deepened her understanding of family; and her colleagues and students in the Cathedral community she forged an imagination capacious enough to welcome science and story, grief and joy. Her novels remain fixtures in classrooms and bedside stacks, and her essays continue to guide artists and seekers who refuse to choose between curiosity and faith.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Madeleine, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Writing - Free Will & Fate - Faith.

• Madeleine L'Engle books in order: Time Quintet: A Wrinkle in Time; A Wind in the Door; A Swiftly Tilting Planet; Many Waters; An Acceptable Time. Austin Family: Meet the Austins; The Moon by Night; The Young Unicorns; A Ring of Endless Light; Troubling a Star. O’Keefe: The Arm of the Starfish; Dragons in the Waters; A House Like a Lotus.
• Madeleine L'Engle poetry: The Weather of the Heart; A Cry Like a Bell; The Ordering of Love: New and Collected Poems; Lines Scribbled on an Envelope and Other Poems.
• Madeleine L'Engle interesting facts: Won the 1963 Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time; that book was rejected by 26+ publishers; blended science, fantasy, and Christian themes; longtime writer-in-residence at NYC’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine; kept a Connecticut home (Crosswicks) and wrote the Crosswicks Journals.
• Madeleine L'Engle pronunciation: MAD-uh-lin LENG-guhl
• How old was Madeleine L'Engle? She became 88 years old

• Wikipedia