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Conversations with Madeleine L'Engle

Conversations with Madeleine L'Engle

Edited by Jackie C. Horne
Series: Literary Conversations Series

Paperback : 9781496819840, 226 pages, December 2018
Hardcover : 9781496819833, 226 pages, December 2018

Collected interviews with the beloved author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, but who is best known for her Newbery Award–winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time

Description

Conversations with Madeleine L’Engle is the first collection of interviews with the beloved children’s book author best known for her 1962 Newbery Award–winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. However, Madeleine L’Engle's accomplishments as a writer spread far beyond children’s literature. Beginning her career as a literary novelist for adults, L’Engle (1918–2007) continued to write fiction for both young and old long after A Wrinkle in Time. In her sixties, she published personal memoirs and devotional texts that explored her relationship with religion. At the time of her death, L’Engle was mourned by fans of her children’s books and the larger Christian community.

L’Engle’s books, as well as her life, were often marked by contradictions. A consummate storyteller, L’Engle carefully crafted and performed a public self-image via her interviews. Weaving through the documentable facts in these interviews are partial lies, misdirections, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. But, when read against her fictions, these “truths” can help us see L’Engle more deeply—what she wanted for herself and for her children, what she believed about good and evil, and what she thought was the right way and the wrong way to be a family—than if she had been able to articulate the truth more directly.

The thirteen interviews collected here reveal an amazing feat of authorial self-fashioning, as L’Engle transformed from novelist to children’s author to Christian writer and attempted to craft a public persona that would speak to each of these different audiences in meaningful, yet not painfully revealing, ways.

Reviews

"Ultimately, Horne’s thoughtfully curated sampling of reprinted interviews paired with her insights in the introduction make this collection a useful resource for L’Engle scholars and fans alike. "

- Sara Hays, Cumberland University, Fafnir, vol. 7, iss. 1, 2020

"A welcome addition to the Literary Conversations Series. "

- Chantel Lavoie, The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 44, Number 1, January 2020

"This volume offers a fascinating portrait of an author and mother with her extraordinary circumstances and working conditions as a representative of the educated middle class in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how L’Engle, inspired by the intellectual currents of her time, at the same time thought and wrote in opposition to the movements of the zeitgeist"

- Jutta Reusch, translated by Nikola von Merveldt, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature

"Both her way of speaking and the interview genre make for a vivid read that revives and pays tribute to this dazzling author, redering something of her energy, her humor, the unconditionality of her passion for literature, and her multilayered religious sense of mission."

- Jutta Reusch, Bookbird