Critical Evaluation

“Before they returned to the city, the family embarked on a 10-week, cross-country trip. It was during their time camping that L’Engle got the idea for A Wrinkle in Time: “We drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs. Whatsit. Mrs. Who. Mrs .Which.” The story wove in elements of her life (many, including L’Engle, have identified the character Meg Murry as L’Engle), and although she had never taken a science course, she used elements in her story that she had been reading about. L’Engle would later explain to a friend, Dana Catharine, that “she had written A Wrinkle in Time as a way of finding her spiritual life because she hadn’t been able to find spiritual meaning in anything else that she had experienced or read until that time.”

Andrew Liptak, “Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time,” Kirkus Reviews, September 25, 2014

First Excerpt

“It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook. Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

She wasn’t usually afraid of weather. —It’s not just the weather, she thought. —It’s the weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.

School. School was all wrong. She’d been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That morning one of her teachers had said crossly, ‘Really, Meg, I don’t understand how a child with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student. If you don’t manage to do a little better you’ll have to stay back next year.’

During lunch she’d roughhoused a little to try to make herself feel better, and one of the girls said scornfully, ‘After all, Meg, we aren’t grade-school kids anymore. Why do you always act like such a baby?’

And on the way home from school, as she walked up the road with her arms full of books, one of the boys had said something about her ‘dumb baby brother.’ At this she’d thrown the books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye.

Sandy and Dennys, her ten-year-old twin brothers, who got home from school an hour earlier than she did, were disgusted.

‘Let us do the fighting when it’s necessary,’ they told her.

—A delinquent, that’s what I am, she thought grimly. —That’s what they’ll be saying next. Not Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father—

But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her mother could talk about him in a natural way, saying, ‘When your father gets back—’

Gets back from where? And when? Surely her mother must know what people were saying, must be aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it did Meg. But if it did she gave no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity of her expression.

—Why can’t I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?”

 

Second Excerpt

“In the kitchen a light was already on, and Charles Wallace was sitting at the table drinking milk and eating bread and jam. He looked very small and vulnerable sitting there alone in the big old-fashioned kitchen, ablond little boy in faded blue Dr. Dentons, his feet swinging a good six inches above the floor.
‘Hi,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ From under the table where he was
lying at Charles Wallace’s feet, hoping for a crumb or two, Fortinbras raised his slender dark head in greeting to Meg and his tail thumped against the floor. Fortinbras had arrived on their doorstep, a half-grown puppy, scrawny and abandoned, one winter night. He was, Meg’s father had decided, part Llewellyn setter and part greyhound, and he had a slender, dark beauty that was all his own.
‘Why didn’t you come up to the attic?’ Meg asked her brother, speaking as though he were at least her own age.
‘I’ve been scared stiff. Too windy up in that attic of yours,’ the little boy said. ‘I knew you’d be down. I put some milk on the stove for you. It ought to be hot by now.’ How did Charles Wallace always know about her? How could he always tell? He never knew–or seemed to care–what Dennys or Sandy were thinking. It was his mother’s mind, and Meg’s, that he probed with a
frightening accuracy.Was it because people were a little afraid of him that they whispered about the Murry’s youngest child, who
was rumored to be not quite bright? ‘I’ve heard that clever people often have subnormal children,’ Meg had once overheard. ‘The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren’t all there.’
It was true that Charles Wallace seldom spoke when anybody was around, so that many people thought he’d never learned to talk.
And it was true that he hadn’t talked at all until he was almost four. Meg would turn white with fury when people looked at him and clucked, shaking their heads sadly.
‘Don’t worry about Charles Wallace, Meg,’ her father had once told her. Meg remembered it very clearly because it was shortly before he went away. ‘There’s nothing the matter with his mind. He just does things in his own way and in his own time.’
‘I don’t want him to grow up to be dumb like me,’ Meg had said.
‘Oh, my darling, you’re not dumb,’ her father answered. ‘You’re like Charles Wallace. Your development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn’t happen to be the usual pace.’