Wrinkle in Time was a brave book for 1962
Madeleine L’Engle irked many with her mixture of science and Christianity
It took 26 publisher rejections before Madeleine L’Engle (Camp) could finally get “A Wrinkle in Time” into print in 1962. The book was an instant hit, winning the Newbery Medal the following year, but despite its wild success, L’Engle still had fierce critics.
Perhaps most critical were some conservative Christians who believed that the book promoted the occult or mystical elements. While L’Engle considered herself a devout Christian, and sprinkled the book with scriptural references, she was accused of promoting witchcraft — an accusation made later against “Harry Potter” author Joanne (J.K.) Rowling.
The accusations didn’t stop the book from being popular for more than 50 years.
A Disney film adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time,” which stars Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pine and Zach Galifianakis, and is directed by Ava DuVernay of “Selma.” In the story, 13-year-old Meg Murry is guided by three angelic beings on a quest to find her father, a scientist who is missing.
“If I’ve ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it,” L’Engle wrote in her journal about “A Wrinkle in Time.” “This is my psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.”
Before she died in 2007 at age 88, L’Engle was the rare writer who ran in both liberal mainline Protestant circles and elite literary ones in New York City, and who also made conservative evangelical fans around the country. L’Engle was part of an exclusive society of authors, including Eugene Peterson, Richard Foster and Philip Yancey, who are popular among evangelical readers.
“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys,” L’Engle wrote in her book “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art.”
L’Engle is sometimes compared with 20th century British author C.S. Lewis, who wrote the Narnia series of books, as well as works defending and explaining the Christian faith. She graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and a collection of her papers is held at Wheaton College, the evangelical school in the Chicago suburbs that also holds some of Lewis’ papers.
She wrote that publishers had trouble with “A Wrinkle in Time” “because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children’s or an adult’s book, anyhow?”
A woman named Claris Van Kuiken, who was a member of the Christian Reformed Church, wrote a 1996 book titled “Battle to Destroy Truth,” taking on L’Engle’s work specifically and tying it to New Age spirituality. She argued that L’Engle’s works “preserved the ‘ancient wisdom’ or ‘secret doctrine’ condemned by God Himself.”
L’Engle was baffled and frustrated by some of the vitriol she faced from fellow Christians, her granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis said recently. Though she once considered herself an atheist, after L’Engle became a Christian she read the Bible and prayed daily. Her granddaughter said L’Engle’s coming to her faith was slower “acceptance of what she had always known to be true” rather than a sudden conversion.
Though she did not like denominational labels, L’Engle mostly attended Episcopal churches, serving for about four decades as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, an Episcopal church and one of the largest cathedrals in the world.
“The themes that are important in Christianity permeate her writing, [including] good and bad, light and darkness,” said the Rev. Patrick Malloy, subdean of the cathedral. “She was open to questions and to looking at new ways to say old things.”
In the 1990s, L’Engle began attending Sunday services at All Angels Church, an Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side known for attracting artists.
Voiklis, who co-authored “Becoming Madeleine,” said her grandmother’s faith informed everything she wrote.
“She preferred scientific metaphors, and scientists to theologians, because she understood that science is more open to revelation than religion,” Voiklis said. “Religion divides us into teams.”
L’Engle wrote that “A Wrinkle in Time” was her rebuttal to German theologians, whom she complained were too rigid in their answers to cosmic questions. “It was also my affirmation of a universe in which I could take note of all the evil and unfairness and horror and yet believe in a loving creator,” she wrote in “Walking on Water.”
But some conservative Christians took offence to elements of “A Wrinkle in Time,” including what they saw as relativism. The book lists Jesus alongside the names of famous artists, philosophers, scientists and Buddha.
In some ways, L’Engle could be compared to Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “Gilead”; a member of the liberal-leaning United Church of Christ, she still finds fans among conservative evangelicals. But L’Engle was likely more controversial because she was writing for children, said Sarah Arthur, author of a forthcoming biography of L’Engle titled “A Light So Lovely.”
The film, which preserves “a more vague spirituality,” makes no effort to appeal to the moviegoing audience that typically flocks to Christian movies, writes Alissa Wilkinson, a film critic at Vox and an English professor at The King’s College in New York City. Instead of including particulars about many religions, Wilkinson writes, the film smooths “them all out into a vague swirl of ’love.’ “
Would L’Engle have liked Hollywood’s adaptation? Her granddaughter, who saw an early version, said it gave her the “same feelings of inspiration and optimism” as the book.
Hettinga, who had not seen the film, believes L’Engle would have loved the reinterpretation that made the main character, Meg Murry, a black girl from an interracial marriage. For its time, L’Engle’s book was groundbreaking by portraying Murry’s mother as a well-educated scientist with two doctoral degrees.
“I’m not expecting a one-to-one literalism but something that captures the spirit of the book,” Hettinga said. “I think she would like something that caught the spirit and wouldn’t try to be literal.”