Another INCREDIBLE Mission Driven Story for you!
When Madeleine was taken at age 10 to the French Alps and dropped off at a boarding school, when she thought she was just out for a picnic, the pain was very deep. Quickly discovering that she would be called not by her name, but by a number, while being ostracized and mistreated by students and teachers alike, her inner strength was all she had. Her resolve to keep her journal and keep writing through it all helped make her become the amazing author we know and love!
Madeleine L'Engle is a woman who I always wanted to learn more about. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became, and the more I could see the 7 Laws of Life Mission active in her life!
Her story is full of heartache, disappointments, struggle, as well as inspiration, wisdom, and joy! Join me for an exciting journey through her life and another witness that even YOU have a mission waiting for you!
Make sure at claim your 2 FREE CHAPTERS of my book The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World to learn more about how the 7 Laws of Life Mission that can transform your life: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/
I am really excited to be joining you today on this podcast to share with you some things about the life of Madeleine L’Engle, her mission-driven story. She was an amazing woman.
Her book, A Wrinkle in Time is in our Mission Driven Mom and Mission Driven Teen academies. And I knew what a profound book it was, how much I've learned from it. Every time I go back to it, I learn more. But learning about her life and how her writing was an ongoing life passion that dovetail also with her spiritual life and her experiences there. She also had just a fascinating upbringing. I’m really excited to share all of that with you today, and we can see how she lived those 7 Laws of Life mission and what a huge difference it made for her. And what a huge difference those laws can make for us.
Before we get into that, I just want to ask you to write a review. It really helps others know the kinds of things that we cover here and what they can expect. It’s a really nice way to share it along.
Now, Madeleine L'Engle was born Madeleine L'Engle Camp. Her mother was Madeleine Barnett, who was born and lived in Jacksonville, Florida. She had a pretty, kind of a upper middle class upbringing. She studied piano in Berlin. She had somewhat of an education. And she was a little bit older when she met Charles. In fact, she was 26 years old and Charles was 28. She was considered an old maid back then. This was in 1906. Charles Wadsworth Camp was Madeleine Ling's dad, and he was a novelist and a journalist who was from New Jersey and had studied at Princeton.
When Charles came to Jacksonville to his sister's wedding, that's when he met Madeleine and they fell in love and were married and he whisked her off to New York City. So New York City is where Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born, and she considered it home all her life. It was very comfortable for her, and as she grew older, as we'll talk about in a minute, she became very involved in cultural aspects of New York City as well.
Now Charles and Madeleine traveled around the world. Charles traveled for his writing and he would often take his wife with him. They were involved in high society, the world of art, nightlife. They often had parties or dinners in their apartment. They didn't have a lot of money. They were living off of Charles' writing. But he would get things published now and again, and cover their expenses and keep them comfortable. And they got into a pattern of sleeping in late. And then Charles would write, and Madeleine would play the piano for several hours. And then they would go out to plays, to operas, to symphonies, or have friends over to drink and eat and chat late into the night. This was kind of the pattern of their lives, and it was established for a long time before Madeleine came along. Charles actually went over to World War I as a writer. He came back in 1917 and wrote a novel card called Dark Frame, about the war because it had a huge impact on him. And then when the United States entered the war, he actually enlisted and spent, oh, a little over a year in World War I and Madeleine, his daughter, said about that the, the impact of the war on him, that the war killed him, it just took him 17 years to die. He frequently struggled with depression after the war, even though he was really quite a charismatic, confident, charming kind of a man.
Charles and Madeleine had been married 10 years when Madeleine finally got pregnant and he was off in World War I when she gave birth to Madeleine L'Engle Camp in on November 29th, 1918. They had an ancestor, I can't remember who that wasMadeleine L'Engle. And so she was named for that ancestor and for her mother, Madeleine. And of course they loved her dearly. She was the only child they were ever able to have, and they were good to her. They loved her, but their lifestyle was really set. They were used to doing the kinds of things that they did. What this meant was they saw a little of her because children wake up early and they go to bed early. She would be up with her nanny or whoever was caring for her while her parents slept. And then her father would need quiet and solitude for his writing, and her mother would be on the piano for long hours. Then often in the evening they would have friends over or they would be off on their excursions in the city again.
Now her mother was a great storyteller and Madeleine would ask her often to tell her stories, and one of the things that she said about stories was their huge impact on her, in the middle of all this, not seeing her parents a lot. (We’ll talk more in a minute about how school was such a challenge for her.)
She was given a little Bible and she said this about it. “I'm particularly grateful that I was allowed to read my Bible as I read my other books to read it as a story. That story, which is a revelation of truth, people are sometimes kept from reading the Bible itself by what they're taught about it, and I'm grateful that I was able to read the Bible with the same wonder and joy with which I read The Ice Princess or the or The Tempest.”
She also said that stories were a big part of what brought her spiritually closer to God. Her parents, I'm sure, did believe in God. They didn't really go to church much. She had a nanny called Mrs. O’Connell, or Mrs. O, who felt that her childhood was too sheltered. And so Mrs. O would take her on lots of excursions in the city and show her lots of things often in secret, so her parents didn't know. She would sometimes take her to church with her. One of the things an author said about her in one of the biographies I read was, “So how does a lonely child come to understand that she is uniquely loved by God, that she, like each of us matters through stories. Madeleine asserted through the writings of authors like George McDonald through the kinds of books that she herself would go on to write one day.”
She spent a lot of time reading, especially as school got more and more, emotionally difficult, which we'll talk about in a minute. She spent time in her favorite books, especially in children's novels. She fell in love with them, and she spent a lot of time reading and writing. She often said that George McDonald had the biggest influence on her.
George McDonald also had a huge influence on CS Lewis as well. George McDonald is also a fictional character in The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. He's actually the person that takes the main character around this waiting room of heaven and is the wise guide for the protagonist in that book. One of the things that one of the biographers said about George McDonald was he saw storytelling as a moral enterprise.
This is George McDonald, “In physical things, a man may invent. In moral things he must obey and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.” That's because the storyteller is not ultimately the source of storytelling God is, and for McDonald, we cannot avoid accountability of the original storyteller for the moral universe he has created.
McDonald also said, “The best thing you can do for your fellow next to rousing his conscience is not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him or say to make him think things for himself.”
So George McDonald had a huge influence on the way that Madeleine L'Engle saw the world and shaped her even as a young child. He saw the moral universe as something that is lawful that we don't make up, but we bring into the stories that we tell, and that's exactly what Madeleine L’Engle and CS Lewis both did.
They saw those natural laws as immutable and unchangeable, and they sprinkled them throughout the stories that they told, helping those stories be a moral anchor for the reader.
She loved children's novels. She spent a lot of time in them. As she got a little bit older, her parents disagreed on her education. Her father wanted her to have something more rigorous and traditional, whereas her mother wanted her to have lots of freedom.
She and her mother, when she was in her early elementary years, traveled to Europe a couple times. Her mother's parents had divorced her father, Bion had run away basically with his mistress and left his mother back in Jacksonville. And this grandfather Bion to Madeleine lived in Europe with this common law wife and was a very wealthy banker. And so they traveled to Europe a couple times to visit this grandfather and a couple uncles that were there and to see other things around Europe.
Eventually it was time for her to go to school. She started school, but school was rough. Her first school was okay, but by the fourth grade when she switched to a new school, a pattern of thinking about herself began to emerge. She had one leg that was longer, so she wasn't athletic at all and she always felt really awkward and backward and kind of ugly, especially in fourth grade.
When she moved to this new school, they didn't trust her or really like her, even her teacher, which is really pretty tragic. Instead of doing her homework, she would read and write a lot and she says all the way up to her college years, there's, there's comments in her journals about how she felt it was a better use of her time to actually read and write on her own and not worry about her schoolwork.
She also wrote lots and lots of poetry and became quite good at a young age.
But there were two sad stories, especially from this time that give you a sense of what she's going through. On one occasion, she asked to go to the bathroom, and she asked several times for her teacher whether or not she could go and use the restroom, and the teacher kept telling her no. Finally it became so urgent that she peed her pants in class. And this was, as you can imagine, incredibly mortifying and embarrassing and came to the attention of the principal. There was a meeting held between the principal and the teacher and her mother. And what's awesome is that her mother defended her and told her that she would, because Madeleine is saying, I asked to go to the restroom and the teacher is lying to the principal saying, no, she never asked me. Her mom believed her, which I think is great.
A little while later, they had a school-wide poetry contest and Madeleine submitted a poem and they wouldn't believe that she had written it. They just thought that she was too stupid. She wasn't an outstanding student. She didn't get good grades. She was kind of awkward and all of those things. And so they just literally didn't believe her that she had won this poetry contest and her mother was indignant. Her mother went around the house and gathered up a whole bunch of other poetry that Madeleine had written and brought it to the school to prove to them that she had actually written this poem.
One of the things that Madeleine said about this time in her life when she was struggling in school, but reading and writing at home and engaging in story time with her mother was possibly as a defense against the troubled everyday world of my childhood, “For nourishment I learned to rely more and more on the private world that I discovered in books.”
This goes on for a couple years. She feels inadequate, unattractive, is struggling to get by in this school, and her father becomes more and more ill, and the doctors finally tell him that he needs to move to a different climate, that the smog of New York is not good for him. One of the reasons why he was ill from the time he came back from World War I was because he was in a unit that was gassed and it did permanent damage to his lungs. He always coughed and became sick and eventually died I think, of pneumonia.
So they decide to move to the French Alps which is really kind of cool because it's less expensive to live there. And they do have some family in Europe, right about this time. There's also the stark market crash of 29, and so they're a little bit insulated from those world troubles over in the French Alps.
So they go there, but they're very, very unhappy. The parents are fighting all the time. They just can't get their bearings, they can't make the money that they want. They have very little, I'm sure they miss New York. I don't know what all of the combination of factors were, but they were even more unhappy.
Now it's time for Madeleine to go back to school and her parents, without her knowledge decide that she's going to go to boarding school. So they tell her one morning that they're going to pack a lunch and go out on this picnic, and they literally drive her to this boarding school and drop her off. They don't even really tell her goodbye. I think that they were kind of cowardly, to be honest, and scared of having a hard conversation. They didn't want to admit to her that they didn't know how to handle it with her home. That. They felt like this was the best option for her and bear the discomfort and the anger and the frustration they would experience from her. They didn't even hardly say goodbye. They just literally left her there.
It was a grueling transition for her. It was so painful. Her granddaughters who wrote a biography aboutabout the time when they realized that this is what had happened to her.
They asked her, “Weren't you outraged?”
And Madeleine said, “It wasn't so bad after a while, and I learned a lot. It helped me become a writer.”
She said that because one of the paradigms of this boarding school school was that it wasn't good for anyone to be alone. She was always rooming with several people and never allowed to be alone at all. She began to learn how to write. With other people around and with lots of noise and commotion going on, which she said really helped her writing. And when she finally did go home for a Christmas vacation, she found her parents withdrawn and unhappy.
It says, “Her father was ill and his typewriter sat unused. Her mother played Bach on the piano with fury. They were too wrapped up in their own worries and sadness to give her much attention.
'How did you get over that?’ Her granddaughters asked her.
She said, ‘I tried to understand them. I wrote stories trying to imagine what it was like for them. I learned to inhabit other selves, other ages. It helped put things in perspective. And now that I'm older, I still do that.’”
So I'm sure that it took a while for her to forgive them and get over what felt a lot like an abandonment. But she tried to understand their perspective. In fact, one of the other really sad things about this boarding school was that they wouldn't even use the girls' name. They gave each girl a number and only called them by their number. The place was cold in more ways than one, but also physically cold, and she was told how clumsy and forgetful she was. She never got very good grades. She was having nightmares of war. She was ostracized by these girls because the school year had already begun and they had already formed their friend groups. It took a long time, but she eventually settled in, became more comfortable, and got her bearings on this really difficult situation that she was in.
One of the things that happened from a very early age, she started keeping a journal. And it's funny because there's a couple places where she talks about how she was keeping the journal with an eye towards someday publishing it, but she got mad at people who told her that she was doing that, but she kept a journal religiously. She drew pictures in them, she poured her heart out in them and she practiced her writing in them a lot. That's what they were for. And there's a lot of, you know, and, and she bound them and kept them.
It is really pretty fascinating how she thought and talked about her writing. I'm going to read you some journal entries in a minute from her time in America, in a boarding school there. But during this time, she eventually settled in. She learned to really love skiing, and she fell in love with the Alps. She was inflicted with iritis, which is an inflamed iris on a few occasions in her life. It may have been a way that her body expressed stress when she was really stressed, but that was a hardship to her as well. But she managed.
She was there for three years and then her mother got sick as well as her father.
They just decided their only option was to move back to the United States. And this time they were moving in with her mother, Madeleine's grandmother in Jacksonville. And because they loved New York so much, and they were older at this point they must have been in pretty desperate financial straits.
In order for them to be willing to move in with her mother, they decided that she would go to boarding school again once they were back in the United States, and this experience was much better than the one in Switzerland. She again, was seen as awkward and didn't get fantastic grades, but she made herself a part of things. One of the things that she wanted to do right away was be on the student council and you had to be voted on, and so she worked toward that and here's a journal entry about that.
“Tomorrow I'm going to be installed. O diary, I am so happy. I'm so thankful that I have been received on student council. Now that I'm on the council, I must work hard and try and get on the board.”
They’ve included one of her poems that she wrote here as well. I'm just going to read you a few of these journal entries so you can get a sense of what she was like. This is during her 14, 15, 16th years, and in fact, she did so poorly at this boarding school that they weren't sure she was going to graduate. Her dad made her stay an extra year, and she was afraid she wasn't going to pass her final exams, which I'll talk about in just a minute. She was definitely still doing the journals, still doing all the writing on and not putting her heart into her schoolwork. She just never did. She just never put her whole heart into it because she wanted to write from the time she could remember this particular.
“I am rewriting an old story that I wrote last year called Pippa and hope to make something fairly decent out of it. Also, a collection of poems called “Peter Thinks.” And when I’m finished, I'm going to send it to the publishers. I know that many people get a stage when they want to write, but it is no stage for me.
I was born with the itch for writing in me, and oh, I couldn't stop it if I tried. I have always written why. If I look back to earlier journals, I see pages on my desire to write. When I was a tiny child, I was never so happy as when scribbling rinds, oh, I have to write. There is no doubt about that. And in this journal as in my first one, real one, I'm going to copy the wonderful verse from the fringe.” This is a poem that she writes in there and then she says,
“And now I do swear a vow. I, Madeleine L'Engle Camp, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine path and write my name on the scroll of fame.”
That's from this poem that she wrote in here, which means that she will do whatever she has to do to become great at writing and to become a famous writer.
That’s really amazing for a 14-year-old girl to write. Here's another one about her roommate.
“I'd be happier with another roommate, but I don't want to worry mother and father, but I don't like Mary. She just gets on my nerves. She has no enthusiasm, no pepper vitality. She hardly ever speaks above a whisper. And she isn't in the least conversational or original or human, and she hasn't any backbone. And these are qualities I like in a girl.”
So she's very honest and straightforward. One of the things that you find in these journal entries that her granddaughters have included is her honesty about herself. Her self-evaluation is an ongoing quest. She's really tries to see herself and her weaknesses clearly. Here's another entry.
“I am, to put it mildly discouraged. I have tons of work to make up in Latin and algebra, and so I have to drop one of them. And so just as I'm getting interested in Old Caesar, I have to put him behind me. Ms. Mcbee says that I can take the culvert system this summer and make it up and so graduate next year. So far so well and good, but father doesn't want me to graduate next year. He thinks 17 is too young and it isn't. Oh, it isn't. I think 18 is too old, but I suppose it would help to get a more extensive education. And then I won't graduate from college till I'm 22, and then I want to go to the art student league and then study abroad and I'll be middle aged before I finish my education.”
Here's a couple more journal entries from from these years at Ashley Hall.
“I am much too shy. It is mother's despair and mine too. Incidentally, I hate my shy awkwardness in being introduced to people. Once I get to know them, it isn't so bad. And Lenora has often told me I'm a very interesting conversationalist, but I can't be sure of that. It seems to be that I either talk too much or too little.”
“I must stop losing things. I say things occasionally that I shouldn't say. And another thing I do occasionally that I hadn't thought of before, but that is very serious and that I must never do again, is that when I haven't studied a lesson well enough, I exaggerate on the amount I have studied. A lot of people do, but that makes no difference. I haven't been doing it lately because I have been studying, and I didn't realize that I was exaggerating when I did. But it is a form of lying and I've always prided myself on being strictly honest.”
She also told herself she made a vow with herself that she would never read trash books. And here's a couple other short journal entries from this time.
“Oh, if I can only succeed and be a poet and author and an artist, I must, oh God, give me the determination and the will to work and the talent. I wish I dared say genius. I will say it. Please give me genius.”
“Louisa May Alcott had an awful temper and we both have the same birthday. Maybe that has something to do with it. Louisa succeeded and I must too.”
So she's saying these kinds of things to herself during these really formative years evaluating who she is, trying to be super honest about her own struggles and heartaches. She’s really trying to level herself up, make rules for herself about her own behavior and be accountable to herself and to other people, and becoming a better person. But especially that longing and desire, that ache to be a writer and to have that career is just amazing. At such a young age, she heard the call and knew what she was called to do.
She was at school and her father became ill and they told her to come home. And so she took the train home. And on that train, she kept saying this prayer over and over again. “Please God, do whatever is best for father. Please do whatever is best.” Well, she was expected to be stoic and to not cry and to not grieve. And that was incredibly hard for her because she was a very passionate girl, but she was able to do that for her mother. But she just had such an ache in her heart and so much difficulty getting over the loss of her father and missing her father like crazy. So this is what she said when her father died when she was 17 years old.
“I had not encountered a theology as wild and strong as St. Gregory’s when father died. I had to struggle alone, and all I knew was that Father's death caused me to ask questions for which I could find no answer. And I was living in a world which believed that all questions are answerable. I too believe that all questions are answerable, but not in scientific terms or in the language of provable fact.” She also said, which I, this is probably one of my very all-time favorite quotes of hers. After a troubling conversation with a cynical peer who questioned whether Madeleine's father did in fact still exist somewhere after death, she found herself affirming or at least demanding, that we should not be abandoned by the God who made us. And here's her quote.
“I did feel and passionately that it wasn't fair of God to give us brains enough to ask the ultimate questions if he didn't intend to teach us the answers.”
I just think that that's so beautiful. Here's a girl who spent almost no time in church, who's just read the Bible on her own for her own enrichment and to understand that, to engage in these stories, these and the moral values that are replete in them. Here she is at her father's death, asking herself the ultimate questions about. “Is he still alive somewhere and is there a God? And where are we headed after death and why are we here?" And striving to start trying to find some of those answers.
So here's a few last journal entries from that senior year.
“One reason that I don't spend as much time on my lessons as I should is that when I think of a poem, I simply have to write it. And I have ideas for so many poems and stories too often, but I do think that writing poetry and stories and reading books in my free time instead of studying is far more valuable to me than if I did study for I have to succeed in my writing for father's sake as well as my own for it meant so much to him and he just missed success by bad fortune and not enough enough discipline.”
“I do want to go to college, but I can't leave mother alone next year and whatever I do, I must never let her think that it is a sacrifice to me for me to give up college. But I do want to go. One thing, most of the greatest writers never went to college. Oh, I must, I will succeed.”
So this theme over and over and over again, this ambition and this drive to write, not just for herself, but to give her writing to the world and to somehow succeed in that regard. She did end up passing her final exams at school even though she was petrified that she would not. It was, she was really, actually, really worried about it. And then they decided that she ought to at least take the college entrance exams. So she studied for those and took them. And then she and her mother took off to Europe for a couple months to see family again and to just travel and enjoy each other's company. When she got back, she found out that she had passed the exams and her mother encouraged her to go to college. As difficult as it was for her to actually do that, she didn't want Madeleine to sacrifice that for her.
So she went off to Smith and there she met her best friend Marie, who was an actress. They were inseparable. They loved each other dearly and spent all their time together that they possibly could. They roomed together. They had a really great time in college. She dated around some, but nothing really happened in the way of men while she was in college.
After college, she and Marie wanted to pursue their dreams.Marie was an actress and she had dreams of being on Broadway and she had some point, I can't remember when, had met Ava La Galliene. I'm probably saying that wrong, but she was the founder of the New York Civic Repertory Theater, and she was the most famous actress and director of that time. Marie had this little tiny connection with this really important woman who kind of maybe barely remembered who she was.
Madeleine was going to write and Marie was going to act and Madeleine did some acting as well. And they graduated from Smith and they were off to New York City. They got this little apartment.
Madeleine's mom was very unhappy about it, but she did have some means because the grandmother had died, the mother had inherited what was left of their property. She sold off their beach house, which was Madeleine's favorite place in the world and got herself an apartment. In the meantime, her father, Madeleine's grandfather Bion and his common law wife moved back to Florida and they were in the same apartment complex with other family, which was nice.
When Madeleine went home, she could see them all and it gave her mom some family close by, but she wasn't happy with Madeleine going to New York, but she decided that she ought to support her, so she gave him some furniture and a little stipend to help subsidize her earnings.
They got jobs. Madeleine did some tutoring. They worked in acting troops every summer for a few years. They got other jobs in town, got some acting jobs every now and again that paid. And Madeleine, interestingly enough, her mother was really un unhappy that she was in New York and not in Florida with her. And it's interesting because Madeleine's mother was unhappy because Madeleine was in New York and not in Florida near her. But Madeleine really tried to make it as easy on her mother as she possibly could, and she wrote her a postcard every single day. When she was trying to comfort her mother as to why they were in New York and why they were doing what they were doing, this is one of the postcards that she wrote,
“March 21st, 1942. Mummy, dear Darlings, if we didn't keep always the intensity of dreaming we have when we're children, we couldn't even write or act or paint or compose or play or whatever it is we do. It makes things harder for us, yes, but it also makes them better. If we are more unhappy than other people, we're also more happy. I wish you could understand that it would keep you from worrying about lots of things. Loads and loads of love, hugs and kisses, Madeleine.”
She really tried to be attentive to her mother and let her know that she was on her mind constantly. But her mother was just perpetually sad about how far away Madeleine was and worried about how she was living.
So Madeleine writes a play called Ilse and they believe it's a really awesome play. Marie is trying to improve her acting career and get better and better acting jobs. They both want Madeleine's play to be produced. They're young and they're idealistic, and their dreams are big and they are unbelievably persistent.
There's a lot of things about Madeleine Lingle that I really admire, but her persistence is incredible. She was always committed to writing. She never put down her pen. She was always devoting to, to not just writing, but to being published.
These two were tenacious. They really wanted Miss LeG to see Ilse and to maybe produce it. They knew where she was performing in a play. And every night for weeks and weeks, they stalked the theater. They would go there before the play started and after the plates started. In all kinds of weather, they would just walk up and down the street trying to run into her because they wanted to talk to her. I guess they'd passed the play to her and they wanted to see what she thought and they couldn't get ahold of her. So summer theater came on, they had to leave. They went off to do summer theater, and when they came back, they had a revised version of Ilse that they wanted Ms. LeG to read. And again, they started stalking the theater, trying to get a message to her.
Finally, one night, Marie was able to talk to her attendant, who gave permission for them to come backstage and visit with Miss LeG after the play that night. But then the assistant totally forgot about it. And when they wanted to come back and see Ms. LeG after the place, she wouldn't let them. So they stood around, waited around, waited around, and finally when she came out, they ran into her and they said, can we talk to you? We wanted to send you in this note not to read Ilse if you have, because we have an updated version and we want to make sure that you read the updated version because it's better. The girls were really funny. Miss LeG found them very entertaining. They got a cab together, they went home together. Turns out Miss LeG lived like a block from them. And so they started interacting a little bit more. And during one of those early interactions, Ms. LeG was complaining that she had all this correspondence that she couldn't answer. All these people were writing to her all the time and she didn't have time to answer them. And she said it would be so much easier if I could type, because of course not not everybody has a typewriter at this point in time, and definitely lots of people can't type. But Madeleine has had a typewriter since she was 10, and she's been writing all these years. So she is a really good typist. And so she tells Miss LeG, well, I can type. And Miss LeG is instantly excited and hires her on the spot.
Now, the consequence of this was, and the way that that Madeleine put it, was it was the beginning of her associations with people in the acting higher up, people in the acting world, and Miss LeG and the beginning of the end of her relationship with Marie.
When she described the relationship with Marie was this,
“The beginning of our association with Miss LeG was the end of Marie's and my friendship, though we didn't realize it then, because right from the start, I was the one with Miss LeG and Marie was not, I was the one whose talent she believed in, whose personality was interesting to her. I don't know who was more stunned at this, Marie, or me. I had been completely accustomed to thinking of Marie as the superior, one of the two of us, the beauty, the personality. I felt that people accepted me first because I was Marie's friend, and second for myself.”
So as time goes on over the next year, year and a half, they grow more and more and more apart. Marie is really jealous and she's dependent on Madeleine because of Madeleine's stipend from her mother. Madeleine's the one with the apartment, and now she's the one with a relationship with Miss LeG. And eventually their friendship could not bear the situation and they broke things off. So she keeps writing, she keeps working for Miss LeG, and she writes a novel called The Small Rain.
She's proud of this novel. She feels good about it, and she starts handing it around to publishers. And in 1944, Vanguard Press accepted her book to publish it, and they actually even gave her an advance, and that allowed her to stop worrying about acting and taking other jobs and just go through and make the changes to the book that they wanted her to make.
This is really, really a cool time for her as she's working on the book and it's going through the process of being published.
In the meantime, she goes back to the acting company and a man named Hugh Franklin joins. He's just a little bit older than Madeleine, and they are immediately intrigued with each other and interested in each other. They travel and do some acting together, and the relationship starts to blossom. But then when they return home, Hugh does some things and Madeleine interprets them a certain way and the relationship goes kind of cold and she's sad about it. Then they don't talk for a while and he goes off and travels and does his acting again, and she keeps writing. Then later, like almost a year later, he finally calls in the fall and they strike up their relationship again and it just goes really well from there. They start dating in the fall and they're married by the next January, and then that March The Small Rain is published.
Now here she is, she's married and she's got her first book published and she's really starting to come into her own. All of her hard work is really starting to pay off. Her book gets good reviews and they continue on with their lives in New York while Hugh is acting, but within a pretty short period of time, they've kind of become disenchanted with the city. I'll read you a journal entry from Madeleine about. The decision that they made to leave New York City.
“More and more we want to get out of the city, away from artificiality. The longer we work in the theater, the more we realize it is the place we want to work, and the more we realize that it is essential for us to make many friends out of the theater.”
In other words, they want to work in theater, but not have that be their friend circle, she goes on.
“We have got to the point where this company bores us to hysteria. Although alone, they all are all interesting, nice people. When they are together, they seem to set up a reaction to represent everything superficial and artificial. And after an evening of being clever, always with a little edge of smirk to the cleverness of brilliant service conversation, we come out feeling wasted and soiled. People ought to stay apart if this is what happens when they get together.”
So by late 1946, they decide to buy a farmhouse in Goshen, Connecticut near some friends, and then they have their friends in Connecticut and they have their friends in New York City and they're going to go spend weekends and summers in the country.
But then Madeleine becomes pregnant and it's more expensive to live, and so they eventually give up their New York apartment and live in Connecticut full time. Well, she has a hard time in the pregnancy. She's hospitalized for a little while with complications. She eventually heals up. They have a little girl and they name her Josephine.
Then she writes another book. She turns her play Ilse into the novel Ilsa. It’s about Jacksonville and I think some anecdotes and family stories made their way into this book and it's published and it really hurts her family's feelings. So when she goes home to Jacksonville, she's snubbed by the family that she loves. They think that she was rash and married too quickly, and they don't like what she wrote in her book. They feel kind of exposed and it's embarrassing to them. And so she's really wounded and hurt by this. She can't understand why they're upset about her book and why they can't just be happy for her success.
Time goes by and Hugh is struggling to get work. And for a while at first, he's gone a lot doing his acting, and then it dries up a little bit and he's having a harder and harder time getting work. In the meantime, she writes another book And Both Were Young, which is published in 1949, and also has good reviews.
So time is going by in the 1940s, late 1940s, and she's writing and they buy the general store in town so that they can have a more steady income. He was really trying to do his duty as a husband and a father. They run the general store together. They have this little girl, she writes another book, Camilla Dickinson, which is a coming of age novel. One of the key themes in this novel is that you are responsible for your own happiness. And during this time, Madeleine wrote a little bit of her philosophy around her writing, as now she has a few novels under her belt. She says,
“What do I want to do with my writing? Again, that's a question I find difficult to answer to myself. I can feel what I want to do, but I can't put in words that satisfy myself. I don't believe in propaganda writing as a form of art. But I would like my books to make their readers want to be more than they are to reach higher. I want to make them the readers aware of the wonderfully exciting and unlimited possibilities of man. Perhaps I'm a romantic because I don't want to make them disappointed in their surroundings, but with themselves and not too much of that. Really what I want them to feel is: look how wonderful I can be if I only will and I will! How wonderful everyone can be!”
I loved that so much. How she talks about what she wants her writing to do for her readers.
In the fall of 1951, she becomes pregnant again and they have a little boy named Bion after her grandpa, his great-grandpa. it’s a really difficult delivery. She's hospitalized again and they discover that she won't be able to have any other children, and they wanted at least five or six kids. This was very heartbreaking for them.
They settled into their life in Connecticut. They had joined the local church there. She was a choir director and an occasional Sunday school teacher. Her faith was really blossoming and her family and home life. She, and in her writing, she was coming closer to God, working out her the own theology and really feeling more comfortable with herself, more of who she really was and who she really wanted to become.
So for the next few years they ran the general store and Madeleine was so busy with her two children and the general store and trying to fit writing into her schedule. This was something she said about that time:
“Let me realize that I cannot accomplish a full day's work in a couple of tired hours at night. Let me realize that I cannot write a valid book without at least as much labor as it takes to produce a child.”
She's just really struggling to make the time to write as much as she would like to and to get her ideas and stories out into the world. They do this for a few years and finally they start burning out.
She feels really different than the other women in the town. She's the only one doing something like having a career, pursuing something aggressively outside of just motherhood. She's got the story and she's got her writing, and her writing has dried up a little. She hasn't gotten books published. They haven't been as popular as she wanted them to be, and she's starting to feel more and more discouraged.
“Each day I feel a little more desperate. A another part of it is that my faith in myself as a writer is what makes life in Goshen bearable. It's nothing to do with or against Goshen, but basically I'm a big city person and though I know we're better off here than in New York, I'll never, no matter how wildly I succeed on the outside be anything but a misfit on the inside…"
So she says, I miss people. I miss the culture. I miss the intellectual stimulation, the simple appreciation for music or pictures of books and missing that makes her feel resentful of where she's at in life and desperate to leave.
She says: “I'm in desperately in need now of encouragement, not discouragement."
So finally they decide that this isn't working for them, and Hugh just really wants to act. That's what's in his blood. That's who he is. That's what he really longs to do. And Madeleine realizes that she gets to do what she wants to do with her writing, and Hugh doesn't.
So they decide to sell the store. They take a road trip across the country for a couple months and live in a tent, and they have just a lot of quiet time. She does a lot of thinking and journaling and writing. This is where she's also reading a lot of science books. And she comes across the concept of a tesseract, which she writes about in her journal. She's thinking about all of this, all of these scientific discoveries and, and this science fiction idea starts to develop in her mind. She writes bits and pieces of it down. She said she was in Arizona driving through the countryside when the ideas of Mrs. Watts, at Mrs. Who and Mrs. the other one, Mrs. Witch, came to her mind that are the three representatives of the Trinity, basically, but they're the “witches” or whatever in A Wrinkle in Time. The idea of this book starts to form in her mind, and she actually goes home and writes it pretty quickly.
Let me go back and just clarify. I forgot a couple things that happened before they left the Connecticut home for the camping trip. One was that they had some friends die, a husband and a wife that they were really close friends with, died within a few months of each other, and they had a 7-year-old daughter, Maria that the family was very close to. They took her into their home and adopted her. They also built an office above the garage for Madeleine to write in. She spent a lot of hours there and her granddaughters would later visit her there. She had her journals organized and her books, and it was a quiet space. In fact, her granddaughters said that they were the only ones allowed in there.
It was called The Tower, short for “The Ivory Tower” because she went up into her ivory tower to write.
They realized that they needed to let Hugh have another opportunity at acting, and so they went on this trip. She writes A Wrinkle in Time, essentially had a different name at the time, and they settle into an apartment in New York.
Hugh looks and looks and looks, finally lands some work, and they live in New York and vacation in Connecticut pretty much for the rest of their lives. This gives Madeleine a nice balance. She gets to see the friends in the different places. She gets to have the quiet of her writing room in Connecticut and also the city time that she so longs for, and she can be with Hugh while he's out doing his acting.
Now what's fascinating is that here she is an accomplished author. She's been a published author for at least 15, if not almost 20 years at this point, has several novels under her belt, and has publisher. She writes this book, A Wrinkle in Time, and she starts sending it in to publishers and they start turning her down.
The first rejection came from her own publisher, Evelyn Shrift at Vanguard Press, and this is her journal entry when she got that rejection:
“While I was there she turned it down with one hand while saying that she loved it, but didn't quite dare do it as it isn't really classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and I'm wondering if I'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of as I wasn't of A Winter's Love or even of the Austins. I know Mrs. Whatsit is a good book, and if I've ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my Psalm of praise to life, my stand for Life against death.”
When I read that, oh, it just brought tears to my eyes because this is the book that her soul was in. This is the book where she poured out everything she knew, everything she loved, everything she'd learned. It's by far her most famous and most popular. It's what she's known for, although she went on to write books in many different genres, young adult fiction and adult fiction and nonfiction. It just is amazing to me that this is how she felt about this book. And the reason that it was rejected was because the world was becoming more and more secular. The Christians beat her up and the non-Christians beat her up. This is Madeleine's explanation about this time:
“In the world of literature, Christianity is no longer respectable. When I'm referred to in an article or a review as a practicing Christian, it's seldom meant as a compliment, at least not in the secular press. It's perfectly all right. According to literary critics to be Jewish or Buddhist or Sufi or pre-Christian druid, it is not all right to be a Christian. And if we ask why the answer is a sad one. Christians have given Christianity a bad name.” Thus the editorial gatekeepers at publishing house after publishing house practice their own form of censorship in advance. They wouldn't even publish it.
That last little bit was not her quote it was the author talking about what she said. Here's another one to kind of give you a sense of why this was book was so hard to get published. This is a fellow artist Philip Yancy:
“I had my own share of criticism over the years, and it's not easy to take, but here are people she, Madeleine has much in common with, and yet they're calling her a heretic or a witch and banning her books and libraries. And that hurts. It hurts at a deep level and you have to come up with a way to deal with it. And she came up with a way.”
Atheists or the secularists and materialists told her that it was too Christian, it was too spiritual. It had too much God in it, and the Christians told her that it was new age, that it wasn't dogmatic enough, that it wasn't according to all the right doctrines, and everyone just beat the book up before and after it was finally published.
In the end, it was through connections that she had in the publishing world and relationships that she had with other people that finally got it published. Here's what she said when she was in the middle of submitting it over and over and over again to publishers:
“Each rejection, no matter how philosophically expected, is a wound perhaps. The thing about it that bothers me the most is that the editor in returning it to Theron said he felt that it should be at least cut in half, and he thought Theron should do this before sending it to another publisher. And Theron was all for talking to him on Monday and seeing if he'd be interested in it and if I'd cut it in half. [Theron is her agent.] I'm willing to rewrite and to rewrite extensively and to cut as much as necessary, but I am not willing to mutilate to destroy the essence of the book. I told Theron to go instead and talk to him if he was determined to, but this was how I felt and I added that one has to keep some integrity. I won't destroy my book for money, for some editor who completely misses the point, which this one obviously did.”
She goes on a little later:
“This clipping came on Thursday and was a relief rather than a joy. Things have gone badly with my writing for so long that I can hardly believe that it is possible that something may go right and it is the basic inner faith that eventually it will, that keeps me going.”
So eventually after dozens of rejections, we don't even know how many because he's, her story changed a lot. She finally got someone to really look honestly at it, John Farrar. I'm going to read you a couple journal entries about finally getting a publisher to take the book:
“I had a talk with John Farr this afternoon, which was also hopeful. He is not only a good friend of Hester Stover's, he's a good publisher, and Hester talked to him about me and he knew and remembered the small rain and looked through three other of my books and I'm to come talk to him. And as Hugh says, this is much more the way things get done than when a manuscript is sent in cold by an agent. He knows and likes Theron too. And then I told him that Mrs. Watts it, that's how she referred to a Wrinkle in Time because it didn't have that new name yet. And then I told him that Mrs. Watts, it was difficult to classify, but if that, but if I had to compare it to anything, it would be one of CS Lewis's parables. He said that CS Lewis was right up his alley, so he is to make an appointment. He called me from home and I'm to come in and talk to him and someone else in the office about it. Oh, I can't help hoping. I can't help hoping.” So she brings the manuscript in on the 16th, January 16th, and on January 18th, she hears from her agent:
Mr. Farrar likes What'sit. And the juvenile man there likes it, but they're a little afraid of it and are going to give it an outside reader to report on. So my first reaction, I'm afraid, was frustrated rage. I'd so hope that they'd liked it, say so and buy it. But at least I still have hope and I will just have to wait and see if there is karma mines certainly patience.”
“Happiness is as numbing as unhappiness. Bion came into our room this morning. (There’s a teacher's conference so no school), and said, ‘Mommy, Theron says, I'm to wake you up. He wants to speak to you. It must be very important.’ Farrar is taking Mrs. Whatsit”
And then the rest is history.
She’d had some books with good reviews that had some readership. She had a little bit of a name in the publishing world, but with A Wrinkle in Time she became unforgettable. That was the book that shot her to fame and fortune. She never worried after that about being able to publish whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted speaking engagements and other opportunities came all the rest of her life. In fact, she and her close friend were both successful authors and both she and this friend at the age of 88, almost 89, had rigorous work schedules. They were still writing and publishing all the time, still very involved in the book world, in the author world, and still very in demand as speakers.
Really, really amazing how she spent the rest of her life. She was in her forties when A Wrinkle in Time was published. So for the next 40, 50 years, she was in demand as a writer and having the success that she'd always longed for and wrote whatever she wanted.
Of course, A Wrinkle in Time won the Newberry Award and there are lots of people who talked about how it would've never won it today, that they're proud of them for giving it the reward because the book actually quotes Jesus and it quotes great authors and it has some very spiritual themes. But of course that's one of the things that I absolutely love about it.
So looping back to now look at the broad picture of who she was as a woman, as a mother, as a writer, she was very much called to do the work that she did. She very much lived those 7 Laws of Life Mission.
This is what an author said about her:
“She was like Lewis, a lay evangelist, or more specifically an apologist who attempts to explain the possibility of Christian belief to skeptics and nominal believers. Her calling was first to those who don't know God in Christ. In the words of L'Engle scholar, Donald Hega of Calvin College, she perceives the mission of all Christians to be evangelical concluding nonetheless with her mission, that her mission is not to alienate non-Christian readers by antagonizing them…One of her editors recalls in a way, Madeleine was always preaching in her books in conversation. She had a mission and a part of the editorial work was trying to pair down some of that down in her fiction.”
So those that worked with her and edited her stuff, knew that she had a mission, knew that she had a message, knew that there were things that she was trying to say. She did not want to ostracize those who did not believe, but she wanted to elevate them. As we've read in her journal entries, she wanted to elevate them. She wanted to lead them on a higher plane. She wanted them to look honestly at where they were at and want to be more. She wanted to inspire them and elevate them and, and bring them home to a belief in God and a thriving faith.
1- She definitely loved God and all her life. That faith grew and grew and grew. It was staunch. It was immovable and strong. It reverberated. Many people in the Christian world are really, really grateful to her for buoying up heir faith at a time when it was difficult to maintain it.
2- She definitely loved herself, although she had bad patterns of thought about who she was as a person. She still continued to engage in increasing self-discipline. She definitely looked for her talents and put in the work to develop them. She definitely made sure to take care of her own needs, and she recognized that she had a temper and that she was impatient and she worked really hard to govern her heart and mind. That is a theme all throughout her journals that she's striving to be a better woman. She really wanted that self-mastery. She never arrived, but she becomes a better person over time.
3- She definitely loves truth. She talks often about truth. In fact, there's a really great YouTube video that I'll link here where she talks about truth in story. The YouTube video talks about how we can see the truth best in story and that facts are not truth. She was really, really a truth seeker and felt that what she was doing was sharing truth and bringing truth to light. One biographer said:
“Story at its heart is one of the primary modes in which God speaks to us, and thus, it's one of the primary vehicles of God's truth, but it's also formative truth.
The best, most ennobling stories have the power to shape our actions.”
This is a quote from Madeleine herself, "Rather than taking a child away from the real world such stories are preparation for living in the real world with courage and expectancy.”
We know that she was very shaped by George McDonald, who was himself an ardent preacher, and who taught the moral framework. Through his stories, Madeleine followed that same path, taught the moral framework in her stories, and tried. And it wasn't just something that she happened to do, it's something that she was consciously doing because she wrote often about the importance of truth through story and truth through fantasy and that she was trying to help people actively come to truth. She was aware of principles. She tried to live by those. That's why she stopped herself from reading trash books or tried to live more in harmony with those things that she knew to be true.
4- She also loved humanity. She is one that never tried to isolate or ostracize any reader. She tried to draw them in to a beautiful community and to make them part of the bigger picture of what she was trying to share. She obviously worked hard to, she didn't just get an education at school, which she was at pretty rigorous classical schools, but she was reading and studying the classics, absorbing the great stories, and making them part of her, and was self-educating all of her life. She also just loved people and she was good with people of all denominations and of all backgrounds and of all creeds and races and cultures.
“Both CS Lewis and L’Engle had the knack for creating rippling rings of community and connection. They were friends with Christians, atheists, agnostics, and everything in between. Indeed L’Engle as a one-time president of the National Author's Guild Counsel counted among her colleagues some of the household names in the publishing world, including authors like Judy Bloom and Lloyd Alexander. Yet this world rarely overlapped with the Christian nonfiction she published with people like Lucy or the Evangelical speaking circuit. She traversed, her secular colleagues knew she was a Christian, but the extent of her influence was likely underestimated, especially since the only Christians such mainstream authors tend to interact with were those fundamentalists intent on shutting their books down.”
She had a network of people that she worked with that she loved, that she called her dear friends, that were of all persuasions and all races and all belief systems. That was a key way in which she really loved humanity. She served them. She saw herself as a servant leader, bringing truth to the world through her writing. And she was determined to hear the call and hear the call and hear the call. And for her it was writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing.
5- She answered the calls of being a wife, the call of being a mother, the call of whatever was needed. But ultimately she left this legacy of many, many good books that teach a lot of truth. In fact, much of her nonfiction helps convert people to Christianity on a regular basis. And the novels that children can love and adore.
Clearly she answered the call again and again. She heard it.
6- She courageously executed. She was tenacious. She walked the streets in the rain and the sun and the and the sleet to see a woman to try to get a play produced. She sent her book to publisher after publisher after publisher. She believed in her own writing when nobody else did. Even the people who had published multiple other books of hers, she sent it to other publishers until she saw it through. She knew that this is what God had asked her to do. She has many journal entries where she talks about how she can't not write. She tried to set it down to put it away, and it was just something that was part of who she was and she could never, ever stop.
That's the mission-driven story about Madeleine L'Engle. And I really do adore her. It was a joy to read these books about her, to see her spiritual journey and her life journey, to understand that she did hurt people and she did offend people, and she did struggle in many ways with her own self, her own confidence, her own relationship in God, her relationship with her family.
These are all the struggles that you and I have as well. But we can step into our calling as she did. We can tell God we're ready. We can prepare ourselves the best we can. We can dive into those 7 Laws of Life Mission that I outlined in The Mission Driven Life and that we mentor you through in the Mission Driven Mom Academy.
You can hear the call. God has a call for you. You can hear it, and you can execute on it, and we will be here to support you every step of the way. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time.
