RIP Madeleine L’Engle

I just found out that Madeleine L’Engle passed away yesterday at the age of 88. L’Engle is an author I have always been particularly fond of and her writing has challenged me to stretch my mind as well as my imagination. She was a brilliant thinker and writer and was able to communicate her thoughts in a thoughtful warm sort of way that drew you in, like a hot cup of tea by a fire offered on a blustery day by your best friend. She likely would have also been horrified at the use of such a sloppy metaphor. It’s time for me to go to bed, but I didn’t want her passing to go unnoted here.

This below from a NY Times article about her:

Her deeper thoughts on writing were deliciously mysterious. She believed that experience and knowledge are subservient to the subconscious and perhaps larger, spiritual influences.

“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983. “I know that is true of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice.

“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

What turned out to be her masterpiece was rejected by 26 publishers. Editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux loved it enough to publish it, but told her that she should not be disappointed if it failed.

Much of her later work was autobiographical, although sometimes a bit idealized; she often said that her real truths were in her fiction. Indeed, she discussed her made-up stories the way a newspaper reporter might discuss his latest article about a crime.