Before I go on to discuss this week’s book,
A House Like a Lotus, a quick point about the Madeleine L’Engle reread in regards to racism, homophobia and other issues.
If I have seemed harsh on L’Engle on these matters and I may well have been it’s because I am talking about
Madeleine L’Engle, a writer who in her earlier books was arguing for inclusivity, tolerance and the careful use of language to describe minority groups, and an author who, as others have mentioned, was renowned for expanding the horizons of young readers. I am not particularly surprised when an Edith Nesbit, who was completely unconcerned with racial equality, drops a stereotypical image or uses the n-word in her books.
In 1959, Madeleine L’Engle and her family took a camping trip across the United States. The trip proved remarkably beneficial to L’Engle’s writing career: not only did she conceive of
A Wrinkle in Time during the journey, but the trip also provided the plot and background for her second novel in the Austin Family Series:
The novel starts when Maggy, the orphan from the first novel, having presumably outlived her function as a character, gets packed off to live with other relatives as the rest of the Austins take a camping trip, traveling all the way across the United States and back, with various stops to see relatives and national and state parks along the way. It has the same warm-hearted family feeling as the earlier book,