Thank you Madeleine L'Engle

[Tuly]

Madeleine L’Engle, Children’s Writer, Is Dead

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: September 8, 2007
Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.
Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

[Tuly]

One of my favorite books by L'Engle - A Circle of Quiet - is actually from a series called The Crosswicks Journal. One of the reasons I loved this book is because it helped me get to know her husband Hugh who was an actor in Broadway, he died about eight-years ago. What a wonderful husband she had. Also in A Circle of Quiet I enjoyed her understanding of compassion. "Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. I tend to do this , to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself." The other books in this series are: The Summer of the Great-grandmother and The Irrational Season.

[Tuly]

I finally found a list of all the works of L'Engle. Another one of my favorites is Dance in the Desert - a children's book, that I'm still looking for.

18 Washington Square South: A Comedy in One Act, 1944
The Small Rain, 1945
Ilsa, 1946
And Both Were Young, 1949
Camilla Dickinson, 1951
A Winter's Love, 1957
Meet the Austins, 1960
A Wrinkle in Time, 1962
The Moon By Night, 1963
The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas, 1964
The Arm of the Starfish, 1965
Camilla, 1965
The Love Letters, 1966
A Journey With Jonah (a play), 1967
The Young Unicorns, 1968
Dance in the Desert, 1969
Lines Scribbled on an Envelope and Other Poems, 1969
The Other Side of the Sun, 1971
A Circle of Quiet, 1972
A Wind in the Door, 1973
Everyday Prayers, 1974
Prayers for Sunday, 1974
The Risk of Birth, 1974
The Summer of the Great Grandmother, 1974
Dragons in the Waters, 1976
The Irrational Season, 1977
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, 1978
The Weather of the Heart, 1978
Ladder of Angels, 1979
The Anti-Muffins, 1980
A Ring of Endless Light, 1980
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, 1980
A Severed Wasp, 1982
The Sphinx at Dawn, 1982
And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, 1983
A House Like a Lotus, 1984
Trailing Clouds of Glory: Spiritual Values in Children's Literature, 1985 (with Avery Brooke)
Many Waters, 1986
A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob, 1986
A Cry Like a Bell, 1987
Two-Part Invention, 1988
An Acceptable Time, 1989
Sold Into Egypt: Joseph's Journey into Human Being, 1989
The Glorious Impossible, 1990
Certain Women, 1992
The Rock That is Higher, 1993
Anytime Prayers, 1994
Troubling a Star, 1994
Glimpses of Grace, 1996 (with Carole Chase)
A Live Coal in the Sea, 1996
Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols, 1996
Wintersong, 1996 (with Luci Shaw)
Bright Evening Star, 1997
Friends for the Journey, 1997 (with Luci Shaw)
Mothers and Daughters, 1997 (with Maria Rooney)
Miracle on 10th Street, 1998
A Full House, 1999
Mothers and Sons, 1999 (with Maria Rooney)
Prayerbook for Spiritual Friends, 1999 (with Luci Shaw)
The Other Dog, 2001
Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, 2001 (with Carole Chase)
The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle, 2005

[Tuly]

Thanks Tuly, for the insightful list . i did not particularly like Camille.

[Tuly]

Really? what did you not like about it?

[Tuly]

I wonder what Korihor would say about Camille?

[Lily]

uhh, mom, are you talking to yourself? every single comment in this thread is from you.... but I shall miss ms. l'engle also.

[Angela]

aw, man... I was hoping that this whole thread would just be mom debating with herself.

[Lily]

...and thanking herself

[Steve]

Well shucks, now that someone came out from behind the couch, I suppose we can all come out of hiding. But I too enjoyed the monologue!

[Ian]

*crickets chirping*

[Tuly]

I just finished reading the last of four in The Crosswicks Journal - Two-Part Invention. I actually read this book 2002 but obviously forgot so I bought the same book again. This prompts me to mention what a "classic" book is - I believe a classic book can be repeated over and over and it is still very enjoyable to read. This is one of the few non-fiction books that L'Engle wrote. Two-Part Invention, is about her wonderful relationship with her husband Hugh Franklin (a well known actor) and their successful 40 years marriage. Here is an acceptance speech that L'Engle gave when she received the Margaret Edwards Award ( I don't agree with her comments about the King James version of the Bible). http://gos.sbc.edu/l/lengle.html

Here is a quote from that speech. She does clarify for me what has happened to YA novels.

In the fifties we didn't talk much about YA [Young Adult] novels because what we would consider a YA novel today was then being published as a straight trade novel. The YA genre was just being born. And basically YA novels are novels which have a young protagonist through whose eyes we see the story. Novels of science fiction were still being published by the sci fi presses, and it never occurred to me to send any of my manuscripts to anybody but a trade publisher. That may have been naive, but I think it was a good choice.

So WRINKLE, when it was finally published in 1962, after two years of rejections, broke several current taboos. The protagonist was female, and one of the unwritten rules of science fiction was that the protagonist should be male. I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?

Another assumption was that science and fantasy don't mix. Why not? We live in a fantastic universe, and subatomic particles and quantum mechanics are even more fantastic than the macrocosm. Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth. During the fifties Erich Fromm published a book called THE FORGOTTEN LANGUAGE, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.

Someone said, "It's all been done before."

Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice.

There are many distinct voices in the world of YA literature today, and the chief thing they have in common is their honoring of the human spirit. Their protagonists are always subjects, and never objects. One definition of pornography I was given is treating people as objects. In most YA novels we are able to enter into the subject, to feel empathy, to be willing to be part of the story.

[Tuly]

Just read Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of A Wrinkle in Time by Her Granddaughters - Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy. I thoroughly enjoyed this book about one of my favorite authors. Her parents made life hard for Madeleine, but she had very loving grandparents. Yay for grandparents!

This middle-grade biography explores the life and works of Madeleine L'Engle ―written by her granddaughters.

This elegant and insightful biography of Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) was written by her granddaughters, Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy. Using never-before-seen archival materials that include photographs, poems, letters, and journal entries from when Madeleine was a child until just after the publication of her classic, A Wrinkle in Time, her granddaughters weave together an in-depth and unique view of the famous writer. It is a story of overcoming obstacles―a lonely childhood, financial insecurity, and countless rejections of her writing―and eventual triumph.