R. I. P. Madeleine L'Engle

Another death.

Madeleine, may you rest in peace and rise in glory.

From the New York Times:

The family lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; her parents had artistic friends, Madeleine an English nanny. She felt unpopular at school. She recalled that an elementary school teacher – Miss Pepper or Miss Salt, she couldn’t remember which — treated her as if she were stupid.

She had written her first story at 5 and retreated into writing. When she won a poetry contest in the fifth grade, her teacher accused her of plagiarizing. Her mother intervened to prove her innocence, lugging a stack of her stories from home.
....

Her deeper thoughts on writing were deliciously mysterious. She believed that experience and knowledge are subservient to the subconscious and perhaps larger, spiritual influences.

“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983. “I know that is true of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice.

“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

What turned out to be her masterpiece was rejected by 26 publishers. Editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux loved it enough to publish it, but told her that she should not be disappointed if it failed.

Wouldn't that be a lovely way to write, being sort of possessed as one does it?

I was once accused of plagiarizing a Spanish essay. To put careful effort into writing and then be accused of not writing it is an ugly thing. I had no stock of Spanish essays to prove that I had written the piece. The name of the nun who accused me was Sr. Mary Madeleine. May she rest in peace, also.

Thanks to the Episcopal Café for the link.

UPDATE: Tobias, who knew Madeleine, has a lovely remembrance at In A Godward Direction.