Charlotte, Madeleine, and Léna, circa 1973
We were young when our grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle, started sharing with us the patchwork of events, relationships, and emotions that shaped her into the person she was always becoming. She described her childhood as solitary, and we thought it must have been lonely—after all, even we, who had each other, had periods of loneliness. But her stories about growing up and becoming the writer and grandmother we knew gave us the assurance that, just like her, we could survive the hurts and joys of childhood and adolescence.
She encouraged us to read whatever we wanted, and eventually what we wanted was to read her books. By the time we were nine and ten, we had read A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and various excerpts of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which was about to be published. The stories felt like Gran because they were infused with her spirit and took place at her home in Connecticut. However, it wasn’t until we read And Both Were Young, a novel she had written about a girl at a Swiss boarding school, that we recognized a direct parallel to her life. We knew that she had also gone to a boarding school in Switzerland, and we wondered if everything that happened to Flip, the protagonist, had happened to her, too. So we asked.
“Were the other girls mean to you?”
“Did you plant poppies hoping for wonderful dreams?”
“Were you really called by a number and not your name?”
She patiently answered our questions and went on to tell us how she came to go to the school in the first place. She was only eleven, shy, awkward, and bookish. She and her parents had moved to rural France, and on a beautiful day in late September they had packed a picnic lunch and started driving. Madeleine had assumed they were going to spend the afternoon on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, but instead they passed a sign for the village of Montreux and pulled up to Châtelard, a boarding school for girls. It was grand on the outside, cold and spare on the inside. Her parents introduced her to the school’s matron and left her there, with hardly a word of goodbye.
“Really, Gran?” Our regal but sensitive grandmother abandoned at a foreign boarding school, her parents too cowardly to tell her what they were doing? We were outraged.
“It wasn’t so bad after a while,” she assured us. “And I learned a lot. It helped me become a writer.” She then went on to explain, “I had always written stories, ever since I could hold a pencil. As a small child in New York City, I spent a good deal of time alone, and my stories kept me company. But at boarding school, I was never alone. They didn’t think that privacy was good for girls. So I learned to shut out the din of a crowded dormitory, and now I can concentrate and write anywhere.”
We were still incredulous. “But weren’t you angry with your parents? How did you ever forgive them?”
“Of course I was angry. And hurt, too. But I came to realize my parents had their own hurts and angers that had nothing to do with me. Before the war, before I was born, they lived a very adventurous and happy life. But then after the war came along and I was born, everything changed for them. Trying to make sense of all of this helped me become a writer. A writer must be able to understand different points of view.”
Still, the story was grim. After the first couple of months at Châtelard, Madeleine was able to go home for Christmas vacation, but instead of a joyous reunion, with parents delighted to see their only child, she found her parents withdrawn and unhappy. 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?”
“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 into perspective. And now that I am older, I still do that. I’ve never had to lose my younger selves—so that’s why I am every age I have ever been.”
We’ve been wondering and marveling at her timelessness ever since.
We are now able to step back and look at how our grandmother became Madeleine L’Engle, starting from the beginning: What were her parents like when they had been happy, before World War I, before she was born? How did her hurts and joys manifest themselves in her writing? Here, with the aid of her fiction and nonfiction books—along with her journals, letters, and our own family stories and memories—we begin to answer the questions.