Bookforum takes a look at the life of the A Wrinkle in Time author.
From the piece...
This is no tell-all: Published by Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, L’Engle’s longtime home, and featuring several of
her editors and publicists, the book has the feel of a Festschrift—a
celebratory volume in honor of one of the house’s most beloved writers.
(There is also a sense that certain scores are being settled: A number
of the interviewees disparage a profile of L’Engle by Cynthia Zarin
published in the New Yorker several years ago, which repeated
rumors that L’Engle’s husband had been unfaithful.) The L’Engle depicted
here is stern but mostly loving, with a thousand endearing quirks and a
bold and unorthodox creativity. Her writing studio at one point
contained a desk and an electric keyboard, set up with her chair in
between them, so that when she got stuck on a book she could swivel
around and practice piano to loosen herself up. (She believed that the
fingers, like the brain, can think.) Her early modesty—when she and her
husband, Hugh Franklin, decided to give up their acting careers and move
to Goshen, Connecticut, they bought the local general store and she was
known to all as “the grocer’s wife”—ultimately turned into a confidence
bordering on arrogance. She was given to dramatic gestures, once
threatening to cancel a tour when a bookstore belonging to a beloved
friend was left out. Unable to attend a play in which her adult
granddaughter was performing, she sent a fur coat as a gift instead.
She also was passionately religious, a
practicing Episcopalian who served for several decades as the house
librarian at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. One of Marcus’s
interviewees recalls glancing at L’Engle’s notebook during a meeting to
discover that she was writing a prayer. Another person calls her the
greatest preacher he had ever heard. Her piety should not come as a
surprise: A Wrinkle in Time is a fairly obvious allegory of the
struggle between good and evil, and the Austin chronicles allude often
to the family’s Christianity. One of L’Engle’s editors muses that her
books always reflected “her very deep faith . . . embedded in a great
story with great characters,” but the reverse can also be true:
L’Engle’s characters are embedded in her faith, which is the real raison
d’être of her novels. She liked to speak of her writing as an
“incarnational act,” an inseparable part of her religious life.
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