Sunday, June 28, 2015

Madeleine -- new wrinkles

For most of my writing life, my ideal has been Madeleine L'Engle, introduced to me by Frances Shores, my high school English teacher, who recommended  or gave "A Wrinkle in Time" to my then fourth-grade eldest daughter.There are supposedly two kinds of women -- those who grew up reading "Wrinkle in Time" and those who didn't.

My besotment crescendoed when I had the opportunity to interview her.

Now, by chance, I encountered the 2004 New Yorker profile by Cynthia Zarin. Zarin puts to pay what everyone thought about L'Engle's idealized life, but all I can say is, thank goodness she was human after all. I finally figured out that because Zarin teaches at Yale, she had pretty good access to L'Engle. Along the way I found somebody's thesis on the actual facts of L'Engle's science fiction, a subject I've often wondered about.

Then I began looking for proof of what I thought was the inevitable, that Zarin was now persona non grata in the L'Engle family, and found this retort: a New Republic review of the biography by Leonard S. Marcus that counters the Zarin provile. Marcus bio here. 

This post is for the purpose of not losing these disparate references. Other digital tools are available, but since it's not a private subject, the blog is the most handy.