A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time is a science fantasy novel by Madeleine L'Engle, first published in 1962. The book won a Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. It is the first in L'Engle's series of books about the Murry and O'Keefe families.

Plot summary
Meg Murry's classmates and teachers see her as a troublesome student. Her family knows that she is emotionally immature but also see her as capable of great things. The family includes her pretty scientist mother; her mysteriously absent scientist father; her 10-year-old twin brothers, the athletic Sandy and Dennys; and her five year-old brother Charles Wallace Murry, a super-genius.

The book begins with the line "It was a dark and stormy night," an allusion to the opening words in Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford. During that stormy night the Murrys are visited by an eccentric old woman named Mrs. Whatsit, who has previously made the acquaintance of Charles Wallace. After drying her feet and having a snack with Charles, Meg, and their mother, Mrs. Whatsit tells an already perplexed Mrs. Murry that "there is such a thing as a tesseract," which causes her to almost faint.

The next morning, Meg discovers the term refers to a scientific concept her father was working on before his mysterious disappearance. The following afternoon, Meg and Charles Wallace encounter Meg's schoolmate, Calvin O'Keefe, a high-school junior who, although he is a "big man on campus", considers himself a misfit as well. They go to visit an old haunted house near town which Charles Wallace already knows as the home of Mrs. Whatsit. There they encounter a companion of Mrs. Whatsit, the equally strange Mrs. Who. She promises that she and her friends will help Meg find and rescue her father. Meg tells Calvin a great deal about herself, including the disappearance of her father, and they become close. In the evening, Charles Wallace declares it is time for them to go on their mission to save their father. This is accompanied by the appearance of the third member of the "Mrs. W's", Mrs. Which.

Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which turn out to be angelic beings who transport Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O'Keefe through the universe by means of tesseract, a fifth-dimensional phenomenon explained as being similar to folding the fabric of space and time. Their first stop is the planet Uriel, a Utopian world filled with joyous, Centaur-like beings who live always in a state of light and love. There the "Mrs. Ws" reveal to the children that the universe is under attack from an evil being who appears as a large dark cloud called The Black Thing. Seeing the Black Thing even from a distance is disturbing to Meg. While working on a secret government project to achieve faster-than-light travel by tesseract, Meg's father was accidentally trapped on Camazotz, an alien planet dominated by the Black Thing. The children are then taken elsewhere to visit a woman who is a kind of medium (the "Happy Medium") with a crystal ball. In it, they see that Earth is partially covered by the darkness, although great religious figures, philosophers, and artists have been fighting against it. Mrs. Whatsit is revealed to be a former star who exploded in an act of self-sacrifice to fight the darkness.

The children travel to Camazotz to rescue Meg's father. They find that all the inhabitants behave in a mechanistic way and seem to be all under the control of a single mind. They look for the central headquarters on the planet (described as CENTRAL Central Intelligence) and they discover a man with red eyes with telepathic abilities who can cast a hypnotic spell over their minds. He claims to know the whereabouts of their father. Charles Wallace looks into his eyes and becomes taken over by the mind controlling the planet. Under its influence, he takes Meg and Calvin to the place where Dr. Murry is being held prisoner because he would not succumb to the group mind. The planet turns out to be controlled by an evil disembodied brain with powerful telepathic abilities, which the inhabitants of Camazotz call "IT". Charles Wallace takes them to the place where IT is held, and in close proximity to IT, all of them are threatened by a possible telepathic takeover of their minds. To escape, Dr. Murry "tessers" Calvin, Meg and himself away from Camazotz, but Charles Wallace is left behind, still under the influence of IT. The experience of tessering through The Black Thing nearly kills Meg, and she is almost completely paralyzed upon their arrival to the dimly lit, "colourless" planet of Ixchel. Calvin and the Murrys are discovered by the planet's inhabitants: large, sightless "beasts" with tentacles and four arms who prove both wise and gentle. Meg's paralysis is cured under the care of one inhabitant, whom Meg nicknames "Aunt Beast", and she is charged with rescuing Charles Wallace by the Mrs. Ws. Mrs. Which tessers Meg to Camazotz and tells her that she possesses something that can defeat IT. Confronting IT, Meg realizes that the evil IT is unable to stand the emotion love, and by focusing all her love at Charles Wallace she is able to free him from IT's control. Mrs. Whatsit tessers the Murrys and Calvin back to Earth, where they are reunited with Mrs. Murry and the twins. The three Mrs. Ws appear for a moment to say goodbye to the family, but before they can reveal what they are going to do, they disappear forever.

Margaret "Meg" Murry
Meg is the outcast of the family and also the oldest child of scientists Alex and Kate Murry. Mathematically brilliant but less than adept at other subjects in school, Meg is "awkward", unpopular, and defensive around authority figures as well as her peers. Although she has the brains to accomplish difficult tasks, she rarely puts her strengths to use. She loves her family, especially her brother, Charles Wallace, and longs desperately for her missing father. Like many adolescent girls, Meg is unhappy with her physical appearance, particularly her mouse-brown, unruly hair, braces and glasses, and considers herself a "monster" in comparison with her mother. She is about thirteen years old, and is a couple of grades below Calvin, who is fourteen years old but in eleventh grade. Introduced on the first page of the book, she is the story's protagonist.

Charles Wallace Murry
Charles Wallace is the youngest Murry child, the most extraordinary and the most vulnerable of the novel's human characters, and the youngest to journey to Camazotz. Charles Wallace did not talk at all until he was nearly four years old, at which time he began to speak in complete sentences. Now five years old, Charles Wallace seldom speaks to anyone but his family, but can empathically or telepathically "read" certain people's thoughts and feelings, and has an extraordinary vocabulary. A biological "sport," he is intellectually curious, loving, and unfazed by extraordinary people and events. He was the first to meet the Mrs. Ws and brought Meg to see them. Initially able to block IT out of his mind, he opens himself to the Man with Red Eyes and thus falls under IT's control. He first appears in Chapter One.

Calvin O'Keefe
Calvin is the third oldest of Paddy and Branwen O'Keefe's eleven children, a tall, thin, red-haired 14-year-old high school junior who plays on the school basketball team and is one of the popular boys in high school. Neglected by his own family, Calvin joyfully enters the lives of the Murry family, starting in Chapter Two. He also likes Meg Murry. He shows some signs of being able to communicate telepathically, the same power Charles Wallace seems to have, a technique referred to in later books as kything. He also feels as if he has been hiding his true self all his life, and likes the Murry family much more than his own, which is characterized by abuse and dysfunctional dynamics.

Primary immortal characters
The three characters of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which are angelic beings who have the ability to travel at will across large stretches of time and space by dematerializing and rematerializing. They do not have a fixed physical form, but appear to humans as elderly women. However, they are capable of metamorphosing into other creatures. All of them are millennia old. Mrs. Whatsit in particular was engaged in war with The Black Thing.

Mrs. Whatsit
Mrs. Whatsit is first described as an elderly woman wrapped in layers of clothes and first appears in chapter one. Charles Wallace, a five year old boy in the book, found her in a 'haunted house' in the woods, where she has been living with her two friends, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which. Mrs. Whatsit is the youngest of the Mrs. Ws (despite being over 2 million years old), and the best of the three at interacting with the children.

In Chapter Four, the group (Charles Wallace, Calvin, and Meg) witnesses the physical transformation of Mrs. Whatsit into a centaur-like winged being on the planet Uriel. Mrs. Whatsit is also revealed to have been a star that sacrificed itself by exploding in order to destroy a section of the Black Thing.

Mrs. Who
Mrs. Who is described as a plump woman with spectacles. She is seen quoting in Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese and Greek. She also quotes William Shakespeare and the Bible repeatedly. Mrs. Whatsit explains that Mrs. Who finds it "difficult to verbalize" in her own words. She is first introduced in Chapter Two.

Mrs. Which
The physical appearance of Mrs. Which is not described in the novel, possibly because she finds it very difficult to materialize completely and thus present a defined corporeal form. She first appears at the end of Chapter 3. She is the wisest of, and the clear leader of the three women, and upon appearing, immediately demonstrates her vast knowledge of understanding in tesseract travel. Her distinguishing quirk is her long, drawn-out method of speech, symbolized by doubled and tripled consonants in her words. She is the one who usually provides the group, most especially Meg, with the clues the children need to solve the problems encountered during their travels.

The Man with Red Eyes
The Man with Red Eyes is a being who Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin encounter on their quest to rescue Meg and Charles Wallace's father on the planet Camazotz. He is the Prime Coordinator on that planet. Although this man appears human, he explains that IT actually talks through him; that he is a part of IT. He entices Charles Wallace to look into his glowing red eyes in order to find his father. When Charles Wallace does so, he too becomes possessed by the mind of IT, after which the Man with Red Eyes drops out of the story.

IT
IT is the bodiless telepathic brain that dominates the planet of Camazotz. IT controls all the people in Camazotz and makes people often do same things together in a mechanistic synchronicity as if they were robots. IT speaks through The Man With Red Eyes and later through Charles Wallace, and is functionally part of the interstellar cloud of evil called the Black Thing. IT is described as slightly larger than a human brain. Housed in a dome near the "CENTRAL Central Intelligence" building, IT is said to pulse and quiver on IT's dais. IT's aim is to enforce absolute conformity on Camazotz, with the claimed benefit of eliminating war, unhappiness and inefficiency. However, IT is aware of cruelty, referring to "ITself" as "the Happiest Sadist".

Dr. Alex Murry
Meg's father is an astrophysicist, researching the mysteries of the space/time continuum, specifically five-dimensional means of travel between planets. He is also the father of Meg, Sandy, Dennys and Charles Wallace. He has been missing for some time as the novel opens. Not even his government colleagues know where he is. His first name is revealed in the fifth and last Time novel An Acceptable Time. In the television adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, he is renamed Jack. He first appears in a flashback in Chapter One.

Dr. Kate Murry
Meg's Mother is a microbiologist, wife of Dr. Alexander Murry, and mother of the four Murry children. She is considered beautiful by the Murry children and others, having "flaming red hair" and violet eyes. Her physical attractiveness, academic and scientific accomplishments give Meg a bit of an inferiority complex. She is introduced in Chapter One, and usually referred to as Mrs. Murry. As in her husband's case, her first name is given in the subsequently published An Acceptable Time. The television version of her character is renamed Dana.

Sandy Murry
Sandy and his twin brother Dennys are the middle children in the Murry family, older than Charles Wallace but younger than Meg. They are 10 years old at the time of this book. Sandy is named after his father, Dr. Alex Murry. Although they are certainly intelligent, Sandy and his twin are considered the "normal" children in the family: B students, good at sports, and well able to fit in with their peers. Of the twins, Sandy is generally the leader, and the more pragmatic of the two. He and Dennys first appear in Chapter One.

Dennys Murry
Dennys is the twin of Sandy Murry. Dennys and his twin are usually inseparable, with Dennys generally following Sandy's lead. However, Dennys is slightly less skeptical than his brother about the strange theories and even stranger adventures of Meg and Charles Wallace. (Note: The name Dennys is a shortened version of "Dionysus", which is the name of a Greek god, but is pronounced the same way as the more common spelling "Dennis.")

Supporting alien characters
The Happy Medium lives in a cavern on a planet in Orion's Belt. Human in appearance, she is described as wearing a satin gown and a silk turban, and uses a crystal ball to look at distant places and people. Her title comes from the character's jolly temperament, and her preference for looking at happy things. She helps Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace see The Black Thing through the crystal ball and understand what they are fighting against. She is introduced in chapter five. (The name "Happy Medium" is a pun alluding to the common expression for reaching an acceptable compromise: "to find a happy medium.")

Aunt Beast is a character who takes care of Meg on the planet Ixchel after Meg is "frozen" by the Black Thing. Introduced in chapter ten, the character has four arms, no eyes, and numerous long, waving tentacles instead of fingers. Tall, gray in color, sightless and telepathic, Aunt Beast has a motherly, nurturing attitude toward Meg. The name Aunt Beast is one that Meg and the alien come up with together, based on the character's perusal of Meg's mind. The character's actual name, if any, is not given.

Locations
Early scenes in the novel take place in and around an unnamed village, later established in An Acceptable Time as being in Connecticut. The nearly 200-year-old Murry farmhouse has parallels in the Austin family series of books and in L'Engle's own Connecticut home, Crosswicks.

When Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace travel to other planets, the ones whose names are given include the following:
 * Camazotz – A planet of extreme, enforced conformity, ruled by a disembodied brain called IT. Camazotz is similar to Earth, with familiar trees such as birches, pines, and maples, an ordinary hill on which the children arrive, and a town with smokestacks, which "might have been one of any number of familiar towns". The horror of the place arises from its ordinary appearance, endlessly duplicated. Thus, the houses are "all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray"; this characterization has been compared with "the burgeoning American suburbia" such as the post-war housing developments of Levittown, Pennsylvania. The people who live in the houses are similarly described, with "mother figures" who "all gave the appearance of being the same". Camazotz has also been compared with "an early sixties American image of life in a Communist state", a characterization partially dismissed as too glib. The name Camazotz refers to a Mayan bat god, one of L'Engle's many mythological allusions in her nomenclature.
 * Ixchel – A planet of muted colors, inhabited by tall, sightless creatures with tentacles. It orbits the same sun as Camazotz. The name Ixchel refers to a Mayan jaguar goddess of medicine.
 * Uriel – A planet with extremely tall mountains, an allusion to the Archangel Uriel. It is inhabited by creatures that resemble winged centaurs. It is "the third planet of the Star Malak (meaning 'angel' in Hebrew) in the spiral nebula Messier 101", which would place it at roughly 25 million light-years from Earth. The site of Mrs. Whatsit's temporary transformation into one of these winged creatures, it is the place where "the guardian angels" (i.e. the Mrs. Ws, who are explicitly referred to as such by Calvin later in the book) "show the questers a vision of the universe that is obscured on earth."

They also stop briefly on an unnamed two-dimensional planet and on an unnamed planet in Orion's belt, the latter of which is the home of the Happy Medium.

Major themes
Madeleine L'Engle's fantasy works are in part highly expressive of her Christian viewpoint in a manner somewhat similar to that of Christian fantasy writer C.S. Lewis. She was herself the official writer-in-residence at New York City's Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which is known for its prominent position in the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church. L'Engle's liberal Christianity has been the target of criticism from more conservative Christians, especially with respect to certain elements of A Wrinkle in Time.

The novel contains several references to Biblical verses (in addition to quotes from various famous philosophers, poets, and playwrights). The most well-known of these is a quote from 1st Corinthians from which the book's final chapter derives its title. Mrs. Who advises Meg, "The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty...." —1 Corinthians 1:25–28

Another major Biblical reference is the hymn of praise sung by the centaur-like beings on the planet Uriel which translates to a very close paraphrase of lines from Isaiah and the Psalms "Sing unto the Lord a new song, and His praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein"; similarly, the alien that Meg calls 'Aunt Beast' quotes a line (without attribution) from Paul's Epistle to the Romans concerning being called and justified according to God's purpose, another line from the same is earlier cited by Meg's father.

The theme of picturing the fight of good against evil as a battle of light and darkness is a recurring one. It is manner reminiscent of the prologue to the Gospel of John which is also quoted once. When the "Mrs. W"s reveal their secret roles in the cosmic fight against "the darkness" they ask the children to name some figures on Earth (a partially dark planet) who fight the darkness. They name Jesus, and later in the discussion Buddha is named as well, along with various creative artists and philanthropists. The three women are described as ancient star-beings who act as guardian angels.

This novel is on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 at number 22. Reasons given include the book's references to witches and crystal balls (although the characters are not in fact witches, and the crystal ball is a science-fictional one), the claim that it "challenges religious beliefs", and the listing of Jesus "with the names of great artists, philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders".

History
The book was written between 1959 and 1960. L'Engle has written repeatedly about the writing of the story and the long struggle to get it published. In A Circle of Quiet (1972, ISBN 0-374-12374-8), she explains that the book was conceived "during a time of transition". After years of living at Crosswicks and running a general store, L'Engle's family, the Franklins, moved back to New York City, first taking a ten-week camping trip across the country and back again. L'Engle writes that "we drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs. Whatsit. Mrs. Who. Mrs. Which." This was in the spring of 1959. L'Engle was reading about quantum physics at the time, which also made its way into the story. However, when she completed the book in early 1960, it was rejected by at least 26 publishers, because it was, in L'Engle's words, "too different", and "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adults' book, anyhow?"

In "A Special Message from Madeleine L'Engle" on the Random House website, L'Engle explains another possible reason for the rejections: "A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book," which at the time "wasn't done" according to L'Engle. After trying "forty-odd" publishers (L'Engle later said "twenty-six rejections"), L'Engle's agent returned the manuscript to her. Then at Christmas, L'Engle threw a tea party for her mother. One of the guests happened to know John Farrar of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and insisted that L'Engle should meet with him. Although the publisher did not at the time publish a line of children's books, Farrar met L'Engle, liked the novel and ultimately published it.

The book has been continuously in print since its first publication. The hardback edition is still published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The original blue dust jacket by Ellen Raskin was replaced with new art by Leo and Diane Dillon with the publication of A Swiftly Tilting Planet in 1978. The book has also been published in a twenty-fifth anniversary collectors' edition (limited to 500 signed and numbered copies), at least two book club editions (one hardback, one Scholastic Book Services paperback), as a trade paperback under the Dell Yearling imprint, and as a mass market paperback under the Dell Laurel-Leaf imprint. The cover art on the paperback editions has changed several times since first publication.

The book was reissued by Square Fish in trade and mass market paperback formats in May 2007, along with the rest of the Time Quartet. This new edition includes a previously unpublished interview with L'Engle as well as the text of her Newbery Medal acceptance speech.

Hope Larson is creating a graphic novel adaptation of the book, which is expected to be released in the Fall of 2012.

Other books in the series
L'Engle has written three other books featuring this generation of the Murry family, collectively known as the Time Quartet. Listed in order of the internal chronology of the series, they are:


 * A Wind in the Door (1973) ISBN 0-374-38443-6
 * Many Waters (1986) ISBN 0-374-34796-4
 * A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) ISBN 0-374-37362-0

Note that although Many Waters was published approximately eight years after A Swiftly Tilting Planet, it takes place several years earlier, when Sandy and Dennys are in high school and Meg is in college.

Four further novels have been published that feature Meg and Calvin's children, especially Polly O'Keefe. The most recent of these, An Acceptable Time (1989, ISBN 0-374-30027-5) features Meg's parents, and is marketed with the four Murry books as part of the Time Quintet; Sandy Murry appears prominently in A House Like a Lotus, which features Polly O'Keefe. Nearly every novel by Madeleine L'Engle connects to the Murry-O'Keefe series either directly or indirectly due to appearances by recurring characters. See also: List of L'Engle's works and Major characters in the works of Madeleine L'Engle for further detail.

Concerning A Wrinkle in Time

 * Scholastic BookFiles: A Reading Guide to A Wrinkle in Time ISBN 0-439-46364-5
 * Chase, Carole F. Suncatcher: A Study of Madeleine L'Engle and Her Writing, p. 170. Innisfree Press, 1998, ISBN 1-880913-31-3

Audio book
An unabridged four cassette audio edition, read by the author, was released in 1994 by Listening Library, ISBN 0-8072-7587-5.



Television movie
In 2003, a television adaptation of the novel was made by Disney. The movie was directed by John Kent Harrison, and the teleplay was written by Susan Shilliday. Among the many differences between the book and the movie are different first names for Meg's parents and a more contemporary and attractive look for Meg, with neither glasses nor braces. More significantly, religious elements of the novel are largely omitted. For example, the name of Jesus is not mentioned as one who fought against evil; and when Mrs. Whatsit asks Charles Wallace to translate the song of the centaur-like creatures on Uriel, he simply says "it's about joy". In an interview with Newsweek, when L'Engle was asked if the film "met her expectations" she said, "Yes, I expected it to be bad, and it is." The film was subsequently released on DVD. The special features included a "very rare" interview with Madeleine L'Engle, discussing the novel.

The tesseract concept
In the novel the concept of a tesseract functions more or less like what in modern science-fiction is called a space warp or a wormhole, a portal from one area of space to another which is possible through the bending of the structure of the space-time continuum. A similar concept occurs in Frank Herbert's Dune novel where it is called the Holzman effect. However, in formal math, a tesseract is a four-dimensional structure similar to a three-dimensional cube, or a two-dimensional square. Such a structure simply presupposes four dimensions of space, but implies nothing about bending the structure of space.