Maggie's Farm

Megan Cox Gurdon in the WSJ on A Wrinkle in Time. (h/t, The Corner) A quote:

Of course I wasn't the only reader to find Ms. L'Engle's work of science fantasy initially disconcerting. Famously, 26 publishers rebuffed the manuscript before the author found a benefactor in Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1962. Winning the Newbery a year later secured the book's place in the pantheon of children's literature, and since then innumerable schoolchildren have experienced the dazzling weirdness of a story that starts with quantum physics and ends with a child's love overcoming vast powers of evil.

"It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice," Ms. L'Engle said in her Newbery acceptance speech. "And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.

Coming back to the book 30 years later, it's striking how true the same process is for the reader. A child is inclined to take away very different lessons from a novel than is an adult. For one thing, "A Wrinkle in Time" is infused with Christian faith to such a degree that, were it newly published today, it would probably be relegated to the religious section of the bookstore.