Madeleine L’Engle Biographical Sketch / Page 2 of 4

Three years later, Madeleine and her parents moved back to the United States and, just shy of her 15th birthday, Madeleine was sent away to yet another boarding school: Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina. But unlike at Chatelard, she quickly settled in and found her niche, though making friends remained a challenge. Joining the drama club, she discovered both a love for performing and an interest in playwriting. Her dedication to writing in general became consuming. “I was born with the itch for writing in me, and o, i couldn’t stop it if i tried,” she wrote in her journal in 1934.

Madeleine’s high school years were shaken by two deaths–the first, of her grandmother, and then, more traumatically, her father’s. In the fall of 1936, shortly before her 18th birthday, Charles fell gravely ill with pneumonia. News of his hospitalization was dispatched to Ashley Hall and she was summoned to Jacksonville to say goodbye. He died before she arrived.  Devastated, Madeleine made a pledge in Charles’s honor: “I have to succeed in my writing for Father’s sake as well as my own,” she wrote in her journal on December 11, 1936, “for it meant so much to him, and he just missed success by bad fortune and not enough discipline.” An absent or distant father would become a leitmotif in many of her novels, most famously in A Wrinkle in Time, whose adolescent protagonist Meg saves her father and defeats evil through love.

Madeleine went on to attend Smith College, where in 1941 she earned a B.A. in English. Newly graduated, she moved back to New York City and began a 6 year career in the theater. On Broadway and on tour, she made good use of her many hours in the wings and backstage by summoning that “force field of silence” to write a first novel — The Small Rain (Vanguard: 1945) — in snatches of time between scenes.

The New York Times called the novel “evidence of a fresh new talent,” the work of a “young actress [who had] somehow managed to compose [it] during the hurry and bustle of a road tour.” Strong, steady sales earned Madeleine a livable income for the next several years. Fourteen months after the publication of The Small Rain, Madeleine followed up with her second book, Ilsa.

It was in Eva LeGallienne’s Broadway production of The Cherry Orchard that Madeleine met the actor Hugh Franklin, who would become her husband in 1946. They began a family and moved to an old farmhouse in Goshen, CT. They called their new home “Crosswicks,” after the New Jersey childhood estate of Madeleine’s father, and joined the local Congregational Church.