Publishers initially hated ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

Today, Madeleine L’Engle stands as a literary icon, an entrancer of millions of readers whose genre-busting classic A Wrinkle in Time rolled out Friday as a full-bore, Disneyfueled, Oprah-graced $103-million movie extravaganza. But in December 1960, she was a frustrated unknown holding yet another letter from a publisher saying “No thanks” to the book that would become a blockbuster.

“This is pleasantly done — but for me there isn’t quite enough story value,” said the two-sentence blowoff from Mercury editor Robert Mills dated Dec. 10. It was one of a string of stinging rejections that L’Engle lamented throughout her career but that have not been shared publicly before.

“Thanks, but I do not think MRS. WHATSIT &c. (the book’s working title was “Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which) is for us,” said a Sept. 16 rejection from Franklin Watts editor David C. Knight. “If it were a short fantasy, that would be different, but it’s too damn long in its present state.”

L’Engle would speak for decades about the crisis of confidence she suffered as publisher after publisher swiped left on a manuscript she believed in to her core.

“The trouble finding a home for it remained deeply a part of her,” said L’Engle’s granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis, who with her sister Léna Roy has just written Becoming Madeleine, a biography of their grandmother that ends (spoiler alert) when Wrinkle was finally released to international acclaim.

Wrinkle’s tortured birth is the stuff of publishing legend, a delicious example of a blindness to brilliance that also afflicted the editors who passed on C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which Beatrix Potter eventually was forced to self-publish. At least five companies didn’t see the merits of Anne of Green Gables. A dozen let Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone slip away.

L’Engle frequently put the number of rejection letters she endured at 26, most of which she tossed, according to Voiklis, who manages her grandmother’s papers. “She wasn’t a masochist.”

In her journal, portions of which Voiklis and Roy reproduce in their biography, L’Engle described the pain of such offhand criticism. “Each rejection, no matter how philosophically expected, is a wound,” she wrote. “I won’t destroy my book for money for some editor who completely misses the point, which this one obviously did.”

But she persisted through rejection after rejection, continuing to tinker with the work but resisting calls for radical revisions.

She had faith in the story that she called her ultimate “psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.”