A Great Cloud of Witnesses: The Fiction of Madeleine L'Engle
Donald Hettinga, Professor of English
Harold Shaw Publishers

Editor's note: Author Madeleine L'Engle died in September 2007. This essay was originally published in 1998 in a festschrift for L’Engle’s 80th birthday—The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle, edited by Luci Shaw (Harold Shaw Publishers, 1998). 

It probably would not surprise anyone if I were to begin by saying that through my reading of Madeleine L'Engle's fiction I have found myself in unusual worlds. It is a commonplace of fantasy fiction that readers depart this world for the pleasures and problems of other realms. But what has surprised me is that these trips are not to realms of L'Engle's creation. What happens is this: I feel myself transported through time and place—not to Uriel where in A Wrinkle in Time glorious creatures sing continuous praise to God their maker, nor to the orb in A Swiftly Tilting Planet where time-traveling unicorns are hatched to drink and serve the wind. The place I arrive has more of the feel of that seventeenth-century village where a Pastor Mortmain stirred a cauldron of hate and suspicion. Yet while the emotional atmosphere matches L'Engle's account of that witchhunt, the setting I find myself in is much more modern.

The walls are heavily paneled in dark walnut. I sit in a leather chair behind a long oak table and face my interrogators on the panel of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. To the side is a gallery of photographers, with flashbulbs poised to capture my response to the question that echoes from Senator McCarthy: “Are you now or have you ever been an advocate of Madeleine L'Engle's fiction?”

Before I can answer, the walls morph back from walnut to the pastel concrete of more familiar environs, a college classroom or a church multi-purpose room, and I find myself in what is too often a reality—a room full of Christian readers who believe or have been told to believe that one of our most significant contemporary writers—a writer who professes to that same faith they profess—is a dangerous heretic.

Should we be cross with people for taking her books so seriously? I do not think so. We might be cross with their bad readings of her books and cross with their less than charitable discourse about her books and her person but not with the fact that they are taking them seriously. It is ludicrous for defenders of literature to say, as they sometimes do in the midst of a controversy, "Oh, it's just a book. It's only a story. It's not going to hurt anyone." Books do change people's lives. Stories do matter. And so we ought to care about the legacy of any books, any stories. We ought to think carefully about the worlds we enter, the characters and values we entertain there and that entertain us.

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Related Writings By This Author

“Madeleine L’Engle.” Popular Contemporary Writers (Marshall Cavendish, 2004).

“A Wrinkle in Faith.” Books and Culture. May/June 1998.

“Madeleine L’Engle.” Writers for Young Adults (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997).

Presenting Madeleine L’Engle (Twayne/Macmillan, 1993).