With such a famous writer, we may skip a narrative biographical background, and just highlight some personal facts about L'Engle, who as a mother, had seven cats when her own family lived in the country, a situation that changed in 1959 when they moved back to New York City. About L'Engle's own mother we read:
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'Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Charles Wadsworth Camp, a Princeton man and First World War veteran, whose family had a big country place in New Jersey, called Crosswicks. In Jacksonville society, the Barnett family was legendary: Madeleine’s grandfather, Bion Barnett, the chairman of the board of Jacksonville’s Barnett Bank, had run off with a woman to the South of France, leaving behind a note on the mantel. .....The Barnett scandal was just incredible for Jacksonville,” Francis Mason says. Mason, who is now in his eighties, is Madeleine’s cousin on her father’s side. He is the editor of Ballet Review and the chairman of the board of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. He recalls, “England had the Windsors, we had the Barnetts. In Jacksonville, we called Bion Barnett ‘King Tut.’ ”
....
'Madeleine’s parents were the kind of couple whose devotion to each other can stymie children. They rose late, read aloud to each other, and went out most nights. In their apartment on the East Side, Madeleine ate her meals on a tray in her room. Her mother played the piano; her father, after a stint as a foreign correspondent, wrote potboilers......
'One morning in Switzerland, at the end of a summer spent abroad, when Madeleine was twelve years old, her parents drove through the gates of Chatelard, a boarding school for girls, introduced her to the headmistress, and left her there. She was completely unprepared. “I shook hands with the matron, and they vanished,” L’Engle said. She was sitting in her high-back wing chair in the West End Avenue apartment. “My parents had diametrically opposed views on how to raise me. In New York, even once they knew the school wasn’t the right place for me my father kept me there, to teach my mother a lesson, because it had been her idea.”
'...L’Engle’s family habitually refer to all her memoirs as “pure fiction,” and, conversely, consider her novels to be the most autobiographical....of her books. ...
....
'There is a line by the poet Elinor Wylie that L’Engle particularly likes: “Now let no charitable hope / Confuse my mind with images.” It has, she says, some indestructible naïve power. One afternoon, in her living room, while we were talking about the past, she fell momentarily silent. In the pause, I read the spines of the books on the bookcase shelf directly behind her head: “Tituba of Salem Village,” by Ann Petry; “Bruno’s Dream,” by Iris Murdoch; “Hildegarde, The Last Year”; Susan Sontag’s “Death Kit”; and a row of six books by Rumer Godden.
'Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Charles Wadsworth Camp, a Princeton man and First World War veteran, whose family had a big country place in New Jersey, called Crosswicks. In Jacksonville society, the Barnett family was legendary: Madeleine’s grandfather, Bion Barnett, the chairman of the board of Jacksonville’s Barnett Bank, had run off with a woman to the South of France, leaving behind a note on the mantel. .....The Barnett scandal was just incredible for Jacksonville,” Francis Mason says. Mason, who is now in his eighties, is Madeleine’s cousin on her father’s side. He is the editor of Ballet Review and the chairman of the board of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. He recalls, “England had the Windsors, we had the Barnetts. In Jacksonville, we called Bion Barnett ‘King Tut.’ ”
....
'Madeleine’s parents were the kind of couple whose devotion to each other can stymie children. They rose late, read aloud to each other, and went out most nights. In their apartment on the East Side, Madeleine ate her meals on a tray in her room. Her mother played the piano; her father, after a stint as a foreign correspondent, wrote potboilers......
'One morning in Switzerland, at the end of a summer spent abroad, when Madeleine was twelve years old, her parents drove through the gates of Chatelard, a boarding school for girls, introduced her to the headmistress, and left her there. She was completely unprepared. “I shook hands with the matron, and they vanished,” L’Engle said. She was sitting in her high-back wing chair in the West End Avenue apartment. “My parents had diametrically opposed views on how to raise me. In New York, even once they knew the school wasn’t the right place for me my father kept me there, to teach my mother a lesson, because it had been her idea.”
'...L’Engle’s family habitually refer to all her memoirs as “pure fiction,” and, conversely, consider her novels to be the most autobiographical....of her books. ...
....
'There is a line by the poet Elinor Wylie that L’Engle particularly likes: “Now let no charitable hope / Confuse my mind with images.” It has, she says, some indestructible naïve power. One afternoon, in her living room, while we were talking about the past, she fell momentarily silent. In the pause, I read the spines of the books on the bookcase shelf directly behind her head: “Tituba of Salem Village,” by Ann Petry; “Bruno’s Dream,” by Iris Murdoch; “Hildegarde, The Last Year”; Susan Sontag’s “Death Kit”; and a row of six books by Rumer Godden.
'....Despite outward appearances, and what L’Engle was recounting in her journals, by the seventies the marriage was troubled. Friends noticed that Hugh was drinking heavily, and he was embroiled in at least two affairs, one of which, according to Josephine Jones, lasted until his death. When I asked L’Engle about her marriage, she said, “Hugh was lucky for an actor—he was tall, good-looking, and he didn’t drink.” Later, she added, “But he was anything but perfect. In forty years, we had something like four perfect minutes.”
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'Around the same time, L’Engle, while working on a children’s Christmas pageant, met Canon Edward Nason West, an Anglican priest affiliated with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. On the cathedral close, where eccentricity is prima facie, Canon West, brilliant, irascible, and charismatic, stood out: one old friend describes him as “lovely and horrendous.” L’Engle adored him. West became her spiritual adviser, confidant, trusted reader, and the model for Canon Tallis, who first appears as presiding magus in her Murry-family novel “The Arm of the Starfish.” ....
'......“What did you read as a child?” I asked L’Engle one afternoon.... “I was a voracious reader,” she said, counting out tiles. “My grandfather used to send me a magazine called Chatterbox, from England, which I loved. And I read ‘Emily of New Moon,’ by L. M. Montgomery. She had a dying father, and so did I. She wrote, and so did I. I read that book over and over.” L’Engle also read George MacDonald, the Christian fantasist. As a writer, she shares with MacDonald, as well as with C. S. Lewis, another favorite, the sense that there is a parallel universe, and an active belief in the presence of good and evil. She refuses to distinguish between children’s and adult literature, and she has consistently resisted being labelled a “children’s-book writer.” ...
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'On West End Avenue, piles of paperback mysteries teeter by L’Engle’s bed. She’ll read any mystery, unless she knows that the plot revolves around a dead child. '...
'...I asked, is there a difference between fiction and nonfiction? “Not much,” she said, shrugging....“Because there’s really no such thing as nonfiction. When people read your books, they think they know everything, but they don’t. Writing is like a fairy tale. It happens elsewhere.”....'
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'Around the same time, L’Engle, while working on a children’s Christmas pageant, met Canon Edward Nason West, an Anglican priest affiliated with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. On the cathedral close, where eccentricity is prima facie, Canon West, brilliant, irascible, and charismatic, stood out: one old friend describes him as “lovely and horrendous.” L’Engle adored him. West became her spiritual adviser, confidant, trusted reader, and the model for Canon Tallis, who first appears as presiding magus in her Murry-family novel “The Arm of the Starfish.” ....
'......“What did you read as a child?” I asked L’Engle one afternoon.... “I was a voracious reader,” she said, counting out tiles. “My grandfather used to send me a magazine called Chatterbox, from England, which I loved. And I read ‘Emily of New Moon,’ by L. M. Montgomery. She had a dying father, and so did I. She wrote, and so did I. I read that book over and over.” L’Engle also read George MacDonald, the Christian fantasist. As a writer, she shares with MacDonald, as well as with C. S. Lewis, another favorite, the sense that there is a parallel universe, and an active belief in the presence of good and evil. She refuses to distinguish between children’s and adult literature, and she has consistently resisted being labelled a “children’s-book writer.” ...
...
'On West End Avenue, piles of paperback mysteries teeter by L’Engle’s bed. She’ll read any mystery, unless she knows that the plot revolves around a dead child. '...
'...I asked, is there a difference between fiction and nonfiction? “Not much,” she said, shrugging....“Because there’s really no such thing as nonfiction. When people read your books, they think they know everything, but they don’t. Writing is like a fairy tale. It happens elsewhere.”....'
These vignettes give a sense of the writer Madeleine L'Engle, and their source, tells a longer, fascinating story,
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