Spoiler alerts for these novels below!
I first read A Wrinkle in Time in 6th grade. My copy from the library was so tattered that the cover was barely visible. But I opened it, knowing nothing about the story. I was immediately captivated. Since then, I have read nearly every L’Engle novel, along with her four memoirs. Surprisingly, no comprehensive biography of her has been published in the two decades since her death. I suspect that a 2004 New Yorker interview The Storyteller, in which L’Engle’s children revealed that their mother fictionalized aspects of their lives, potentially to conceal her family’s history of alcoholism and her husband’s infidelity, may have discouraged the estate from authorizing one. The Murry novels, however, present a fantastic world of science, love, and family which have inspired many women to science.
L’Engle and Science
Madeline L’Engle (1918-2007) herself had almost no formal training in science, which makes her inclusion of quantum physics in her novels all the more striking. Her early education included difficult experiences in several boarding schools, but she thrived as an English major at Smith College. Afterward, she pursued a nearly decade-long career as an actress in New York City, where she met and married actor Hugh Franklin, who later became well known for his role on the soap opera All My Children.
In her thirties, L’Engle was raising children in a Connecticut farmhouse (the model for the Murry’s home). She felt very displaced and struggled to reconcile artistic ambitions with domestic life. Her debut novel The Small Rain (1945) had found success, but other manuscripts were repeatedly rejected, heavily edited, or sold poorly, in part because her stories dealt with “controversial” themes, including depression, death, homosexuality, infidelity, premarital sex, and disability.
Feeling intellectually and theologically isolated in her small town, and shaken by the death of a close friend, she wrestled with questions of faith and turned to the works of Einstein and Planck for insight. This period of rejection, spiritual and intellectual pursuit, and a cross-country camping trip culminated in A Wrinkle in Time. The novel was declined by more than two dozen publishers before finally being accepted and winning the Newbery Medal.
The Murry Saga
Here’s my rendering of the timeline of the books with the Murry family.
The Murry family are the main characters in five books by Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), A House Like a Lotus (1984), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989). The series progresses until Meg is in her mid-40s, married to Calvin, with a daughter named Polly who carries on her adventures. The Murry series often acknowledges the failings and frailties of science, relentlessly interrogating the ethics of nuclear energy, space travel, industrialization, and biomedical research. The Murry family also appear as side characters in The Arm of the Starfish (1965) (which deals with limb re-generation) and Dragons in the Waters (about environmental pollution) (1976).
In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry is 12 years old, Charles Wallace is 5, and her twin brothers Sandy and Dennys are 10. Calvin O’Keefe, a school friend and later Meg’s husband, also accompanies them on their adventures. Their mother, Mrs. Murry is a beautiful, capable woman who effortlessly balances home and scientific life (she eventually wins a Nobel prize), running a microbiology lab just off her kitchen. However, Meg resents her mother in A Wrinkle in Time. She feels like an “ugly duckling” with her braces, glasses, and unflattering hairstyle.
Meg is a mathematical prodigy. However, the resentment she felt towards her mother informed her later choices. After earning a master’s degree in math from Yale, she forgoes a PhD to have several children, assist her husband in his scientific work, sacrificing her own ambitions in the process. Meg made this choice so her children would not grow up feeling “inferior” as Meg once felt.
However, she plans to get a PhD when their youngest is in school. Calvin’s biology research has taken them all over the world. Polly, unable to adjust to American public high school, is home-schooled in the final Murry book (An Acceptable Time) by Meg’s parents. Her grandparents are still lovingly married and are instructing Polly how to use scientific equipment and perhaps take up the science mantle that Meg never did.
Learning Science at Home
Domesticity is as a grounding force, providing a retreat where ethical reflection can take place. It regulates, soothes, and invites creative and collaborative effort. In the case of Mrs. Murry, domesticity is liberating, offering a space where ethical and scientific judgment can flourish. In a sense, the Murry novels present science as accessible. Mrs. Murry’s laboratory and the family’s ability to travel through space and time from their own backyard demonstrate that extraordinary scientific work can occur without specialized equipment—something many women scientists had to deal with in the 19th and 20th centuries. Calvin, too, maintains his own lab in The Arm of the Starfish on a small island in Portugal, which the family are regularly in and out of.
Before science instruction became increasingly formalized with laboratories outside the household and the development of modern scientific workforces, 19th century textbooks often used narratives to explain scientific concepts. Much of this learning still took place in the household, where stories and experiments could serve as both instruction and entertainment. In L’Engle’s novels, the domestic sphere remains a site of intellectual formation: Meg learns most of her mathematics not in school but from her parents at home, while Polly gains knowledge through independent reading or by spending time with her father in his Biology lab. The household, then, emerges not just as a place of care and routine but also as a space of deep intellectual enrichment and imaginative discovery.
Domesticity, however, also stifle female talent and ambition.
Meg never pursues a professional career. Polly also resents moving from Portugal to the US and frequently escapes her home—visiting Max, a wealthy lesbian heiress, and her partner Ursula, traveling to Greece, or retreating to her grandparents’ house. These acts of escape underscore her need for autonomy and highlight the tension between domestic and academic constraints and the desire for freedom, something the Murry woman never achieve.
Masking Emotion
Emotional regulation is a key theme in character development. As an adult, Meg blossoms into a beautiful woman, with soft, wavy hair, contact lenses, and married to Calvin, her teenage sweetheart. She raises several children, demonstrating skill and care as a mother, ensuring each child receives attention and affection. She never loses her temper, the complete opposite of her earlier characterization.
Alongside this depiction of science, emotional regulation emerges as a hallmark of well-behaved womanhood, closely tied to gendered expectations. Time and again, the “unruly” child in literature (Anne Shirley, Jo March, Jane Eyre) transforms into an obedient, calm, nurturing woman or mother, reflecting a cultural ideal of controlled, socially- sanctioned femininity.
Domestic routines are also the primary means to self-regulation—routines often created and maintained by the mothers. Cozy bedtime stories, hot cocoa, fires, home-cooked meals, well-behaved pets, baths, Bach, and gardening are frequent. Through engagement with these domestic practices, the characters self-regulate, vital routines in contrast to the terrifying Cold War-era world of space travel, computers, and the looming threat of nuclear war.
Meg Murry is no exception to this rule. In A Wrinkle in Time, she beats up other children at school, spouts off mathematical equations, and boldly asserts her opinions. But her poor grades and behavior mark her not as a budding Einstein but as a juvenile delinquent. Emotional regulation is also closely tied to the identity of a scientist; Meg’s wild and unruly outbursts are clearly deemed as being incompatible with a conventional career in mathematics, let alone getting into college.
At the beginning of Wrinkle, Meg, comparing herself to her mother’s serenity thinks with despair:
Surely it must hurt her [mother] as it did Meg. But if it did, she gave no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity of her expression. Why can’t I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything? (p5)
While Mrs. Murry embodies placidity, it is clear she masks her own emotional distress from her children. Her husband has been missing for over a year, and their neighbors gossip. As a single mother, she manages multiple roles within the household, navigating both the masculine world of science and the feminine sphere of domestic routines that soothe her children. Only, Charles Wallace, her telepathic child, truly senses the burden of her grief.
Despite their authentic conversations about science, there is a disconcerting silence surrounding their father’s disappearance. Meg’s outbursts stem from her grief and frustration, but I also see them as her way to elicit an authentic response from those around her. An almost maddening rationality and placidity is nearly everyone in the novel except Meg who is the emotional one. She disturbingly, berates herself at times, turning her anger and confusion inwards (“Why can’t I hide?”). Yet, Wrinkle also condemns complete conformity.
To be a Great Scientist, One Must Rebel
Still of “Camatoz” from the 2018 adaption of A Wrinkle in Time curtesy of imbd.
The depiction of conformity on Camatoz (where Meg’s father is imprisoned and they travel to save him) has often been interpreted as a critique of either Communism or suburban homogeneity. Yet, Camatoz illustrates a deeper alignment of interior and exterior behavior: the inhabitants are not merely performing, they are the mask.
A single controlling force (a giant Brain) orchestrates all thoughts and actions, reflecting the demands of the scientific world, where success requires strict adherence to both thought patterns and behavior. This includes orientation toward production and results, precise replication of certain steps, logical and rational thinking with emotion set aside, adherence to hierarchy, minimization of ambiguity, and continual process optimization. The domestic on Camatoz, resembling an American suburb, is not a source of liberation, but terrifying confinement.
Despite its progressive depiction of a teenage mathematical prodigy traveling across the universe to save her father, A Wrinkle in Time employs more infantilizing language for Meg than for Calvin or Charles Wallace, reflecting L’Engle’s recurring treatment of “unruly” children and the subtle reinforcement of authoritarian norms within her novels. Furthermore, the brilliant Mrs. Murry is not clued in about the search for her husband by the witches.
Meg ultimately saves Charles Wallace from the giant Evil Brain through a nurturing, almost motherly love, a love that foreshadows her future life as a wife and mother. By contrast, the male characters, her father, Charles Wallace, and Calvin, exhibit arrogance: her father recklessly embarks on a dangerous mission, Charles Wallace succumbs to hypnotic control due to his pride, and Calvin displays his own hubris. Mr. Murry nearly kills Meg in his botched attempt to tesser. It is Meg who must clean up their mistakes, returning to rescue Charles Wallace and shouldering the emotional labor that the men cannot.
Other scholarship highlights the novel’s non-heteronormativity. For example, the children encounter sexless and genderless creatures during their interplanetary travels. Mrs. Whatsit encourages Meg to embrace herself through the form of the sonnet: “You’re given the form, but what you write is completely up to you.” This powerful line precedes Meg being gifted her faults (stubbornness and anger), affirming that her individuality is a source of strength. The novel according to Morris 2016 provides a positive affirmation of Meg’s character.
One of the biggest themes, I find is that the importance placed on the interior life of a woman in these books. While she masks on the outside, conforms to the norms of science or domesticity, her interior vision can remain untouched, and can manifest itself in math, science, reading, languages, writing, and art. This is where true freedom for women lays, in her interior vision.
Conclusion
The Murry series delivers contradictory messages about womanhood, career, and self. The domestic sphere is portrayed as both a refuge and a burden, sustained primarily by women: Mrs. Murry holds the household together, even as her children complain about her “Bunsen burner stew” and their shabby home, while Meg ultimately sacrifices her own career to become a mother and homemaker. L’Engle herself confessed to resenting such domestic tasks as baking cherry pie. Yet in the realm of science and metaphysics, women wield the greatest power: the three “witches” guide the children across dimensions with ease.
“The Eye Begins to See” was donated to Smith college archives.
L’Engle had envisioned a final Murry novel centered on an adult Meg, tentatively titled The Eyes Begins to See. I remember eagerly waiting for this book in the mid 2000s— it was advertised on her website and across the internet as “an adult novel staring Meg Murry-O’Keefe at fifty”.
But she died before completing it. This recent Instagram post can give us hope that one day it might be released.
what struck me reading this was how l’engle seemed to sense long before the algorithmic age that a girl’s interior world is often the only place she’s allowed to be unbounded. meg’s “unruly” mind and her anger and math… all the things the outside world tries to sand down end up being the very things that save everyone.
it feels oddly contemporary. the way women learn to mask and to fit the form while quietly doing radical thinking on the inside. l’engle understood that the interior life is the rebellion.
I love how you explore the tension between a woman’s inner freedom and the roles she is taught to embody. The idea that rebellion can live inside thought, imagination, and intellect feels both true and deeply validating. It makes Meg’s story feel less about taming and more about survival through selfhood. Your reading gives so much dignity to the interior life. It stays with you in a really thoughtful way.