A Wrinkle in Time
Based on Wikipedia: A Wrinkle in Time
The Book That Almost Never Existed
Twenty-six publishers said no.
Actually, the real number might have been closer to forty. Madeleine L'Engle lost count. In the early 1960s, every major publishing house in America looked at her manuscript about a girl who travels through space to rescue her father and decided it was too strange, too difficult, too different to print. The rejections piled up for two years.
Then, at a Christmas tea party in 1962, a guest happened to mention a publisher named John Farrar. Within months, the book was in print. Within a year, it had won the Newbery Medal, the highest honor in American children's literature. Today, more than ten million copies have been sold worldwide, and the story of Meg Murry's journey through a tesseract has become one of the most beloved young adult novels ever written.
The book is called A Wrinkle in Time, and its path to publication tells us something essential about the story itself: the best things often arrive after everyone has given up on them.
A Story Born on a Desert Road
L'Engle didn't plan to write this book. It came to her unbidden.
In the spring of 1959, her family was driving across the American Southwest on a ten-week camping trip. They had just sold their general store in rural Connecticut and were moving back to New York City. L'Engle was forty years old, had nearly given up writing entirely, and was staring out the window at a landscape she found completely alien—deserts, buttes, and leafless mountains stretching to the horizon.
And then, suddenly, three names appeared in her mind: Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which.
She had no idea who these characters were or what story they belonged to. When interviewers later asked her to explain how the novel came together, she couldn't. "It was simply a book I had to write," she told Horn Book magazine in 1983. "I had no choice. It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant."
What emerged over the next year was something publishers found genuinely confusing. Was it science fiction? It referenced Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Max Planck's quantum mechanics. Was it fantasy? Three supernatural beings transform into winged centaurs and teleport children across galaxies. Was it a children's book? The themes included the nature of evil, the existence of God, and the terror of conformity. Was it for adults? The protagonist was a thirteen-year-old girl with braces and glasses who couldn't stop crying.
The publishing industry of 1960 liked clean categories. This book refused to fit any of them.
The Unlikely Heroine
One rejection letter pointed to what may have been the real problem: the book featured a female protagonist in a science fiction story. In 1960, this was almost unheard of.
Meg Murry is not an obvious hero. She has a terrible temper. She struggles in school, not because she lacks intelligence, but because her mind doesn't work the way her teachers expect. She feels ugly, awkward, and perpetually out of place. When the story begins, she's consumed by worry about her missing father and resentment toward a world that seems to have forgotten him.
L'Engle modeled the Murry family on her own. The Murry parents are both scientists—the father a physicist, the mother a microbiologist—and they treat their children as intellectual equals. This was drawn directly from L'Engle's upbringing in a household where ideas mattered more than convention.
Meg has four siblings: the twins Sandy and Dennys, who are athletic and socially successful in ways Meg finds baffling; an infant sister who appears only briefly; and Charles Wallace, the youngest Murry child, who is something else entirely.
Charles Wallace is five years old and speaks only to his family. Other people assume he is developmentally delayed. In reality, he possesses a form of telepathy—he can read thoughts and emotions, understand people's deepest motivations, and perceive things that remain invisible to everyone around him. The townspeople think he's strange. His family knows he's extraordinary.
The Geometry of Space and Time
The science in A Wrinkle in Time is genuine, even if L'Engle takes considerable liberties with it.
A tesseract is a real mathematical concept. In geometry, it represents a four-dimensional analog of a cube—imagine a cube, then imagine that cube extended into a fourth spatial dimension that we cannot directly perceive. L'Engle uses the term somewhat differently. In her telling, a tesseract is a method of folding space-time, creating a shortcut that allows travelers to cross vast distances instantaneously.
Here's how the book explains it: imagine an ant walking across a piece of fabric. To get from one end to the other, the ant must traverse the entire length. But if you pick up the fabric and fold it so the two ends touch, the ant can simply step across. That fold is the wrinkle in time. The tesseract is the mechanism that creates it.
This form of travel, which the characters call "tessering," allows Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which to transport Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe across the universe in search of Dr. Murry. The journey takes them first to a planet called Uriel, then to a nameless place in Orion's Belt, and finally to a dark world called Camazotz, where Dr. Murry is imprisoned.
The Three Celestial Beings
Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which are not human. They are ancient entities who can take any form they choose, though they typically appear as eccentric elderly women bundled in layers of peculiar clothing.
Mrs. Whatsit is the youngest and most personable. She shows up on a dark and stormy night at the Murry house, wrapped in scarves and speaking in riddles. In a previous existence—before she chose her current form—she was a star. She literally gave her life in an explosion of light to push back the darkness that threatens the universe. Now she continues the fight in a different way.
Mrs. Who rarely speaks in her own words. Instead, she quotes from literature and scripture in Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, and Greek, always providing translations afterward. She seems to find direct communication difficult or perhaps beside the point.
Mrs. Which is the oldest and most powerful. She maintains an incorporeal form throughout most of the story, appearing only as a shimmering presence in the air. She is business-like where the others are warm, focused where they are scattered. Of the three, she is the most skilled at tessering and the most reluctant to engage emotionally with the children.
L'Engle described them as guardian angels, though they also function as fairy godmothers, spirit guides, and manifestations of cosmic forces beyond human comprehension.
The Darkness
The enemy in A Wrinkle in Time is not a person. It is something far more abstract and far more terrifying.
The Black Thing appears as a vast shadow spreading across the universe, dimming stars and swallowing light. It is not alive in any recognizable sense. It is simply darkness—the absence of light, the negation of warmth, the opposite of everything that makes existence meaningful.
When the children peer at Earth through the Happy Medium's crystal ball, they see their own planet partially shrouded in this shadow. The darkness has always been here, the beings explain. But so have the fighters.
Who fights the darkness on Earth? The children are asked to name some names. They begin with Jesus. The Buddha is mentioned. Then artists, scientists, philosophers, anyone who has pushed back against despair and cruelty and the deadening of the human spirit. Leonardo da Vinci. Shakespeare. Bach. Einstein. Every act of creativity, every gesture of love, every refusal to surrender to cynicism is a small victory in this cosmic war.
Mrs. Whatsit's sacrifice—her explosion as a star—was one such victory. The novel suggests there have been billions of others, and there will be billions more.
The Horror of Camazotz
Camazotz is a planet that has surrendered entirely to the darkness.
When the children arrive, everything seems almost normal. There are houses on tree-lined streets. Children bounce balls in driveways. Mothers stand in doorways. But something is deeply wrong.
Every house is identical. Every child bounces their ball in the exact same rhythm. Every mother opens her door at the precise same moment. The entire planet operates with mechanical synchronization. There is no variation, no spontaneity, no difference of any kind. Everyone does exactly what they are supposed to do, exactly when they are supposed to do it.
This is the work of IT.
IT is a giant disembodied brain that sits in a dome at the center of CENTRAL Central Intelligence, the building that controls all of Camazotz. IT possesses telepathic abilities so powerful that it has effectively absorbed the consciousness of every person on the planet. No one thinks independently anymore. No one chooses. No one disagrees. In exchange for giving up their individuality, the citizens of Camazotz have been freed from the burden of decision-making. They no longer experience the pain of failure, the anxiety of uncertainty, or the loneliness of being different.
They also no longer experience joy, creativity, love, or anything that makes life worth living.
The name Camazotz comes from Mayan mythology. Camazotz was a bat god associated with death and sacrifice, a creature of darkness and caves. L'Engle chose her names carefully. The planet Ixchel, which appears later, is named for a Mayan jaguar goddess of medicine. The planet Uriel, where the children first witness the cosmic battle between light and dark, takes its name from an archangel.
Charles Wallace's Fall
Of all the children, Charles Wallace is the most confident in his abilities—and this confidence becomes his greatest vulnerability.
When the group encounters the Man with Red Eyes, a hypnotic servant of IT, Charles Wallace decides he can beat the creature at its own game. He will allow himself to be partially hypnotized, he reasons, maintaining just enough control to extract the information they need about Dr. Murry's location.
He is wrong.
The Man with Red Eyes—or rather, IT speaking through him—exploits Charles Wallace's intellectual arrogance. The boy's gifts, which have always set him apart, become the crack through which darkness enters. He is fully absorbed into IT's consciousness, transformed into a cold, sneering puppet who leads his sister and Calvin deeper into the building with mechanical precision.
This is one of the novel's most disturbing sequences. Charles Wallace still looks like himself. He still speaks with his voice. But everything that made him who he was—his warmth, his intuition, his fierce love for his family—has been replaced by something empty and hostile. He mocks Meg. He taunts Calvin. He serves IT with perfect obedience.
The Rescue
Meg finds her father imprisoned in a transparent column, visible but unreachable. The glasses Mrs. Who gave her before they parted—her gift for a moment of desperate need—turn out to have the power to pass through the barrier. Meg puts them on, steps through what had seemed to be solid material, and finally embraces the father she has been searching for throughout the entire journey.
But Dr. Murry cannot save Charles Wallace. His powers, formidable as they are, do not extend to breaking the hold IT has over his youngest son. And IT is now actively trying to absorb Meg, Calvin, and Dr. Murry as well.
In desperation, Dr. Murry tessers the three of them away from Camazotz. They materialize on Ixchel, a nearby planet, and in the process of passing through the darkness between worlds, Meg is severely injured. She arrives paralyzed, barely conscious, her body ravaged by exposure to the Black Thing itself.
Charles Wallace is left behind.
Aunt Beast
The inhabitants of Ixchel are creatures of nightmare appearance and gentle spirit. They have no faces—no eyes, no nose, no mouth that a human would recognize. They stand roughly human-sized but possess four arms and numerous long, waving tentacles where fingers should be. Their bodies are covered in gray fur.
And yet.
One of these beings tends to Meg through her recovery. It wraps her in warmth, feeds her, sings to her in a voice that seems to resonate directly in her heart. It cannot see her—the creatures of Ixchel have never had eyes—but it can sense her completely, understanding her pain and fear and longing in ways that transcend ordinary perception.
Meg calls the creature Aunt Beast, and the name sticks. The being's true name, like much else on Ixchel, remains unpronounceable and perhaps unconceptualizable to human minds.
Here L'Engle makes one of her most profound points. The universe is vast beyond imagination. It contains intelligences utterly unlike our own. But love—genuine, self-giving love—transcends all differences. Aunt Beast is more alien than anything Meg has encountered, more alien even than the three celestial beings who brought her here. And yet Aunt Beast is also, in the deepest sense, family.
What Meg Has That IT Does Not
When the three supernatural beings return to Ixchel, they deliver difficult news: Meg must return to Camazotz alone. Neither her father nor Calvin can accompany her. Neither Mrs. Whatsit nor Mrs. Who nor Mrs. Which can help directly. Only Meg has what is needed to free Charles Wallace.
What does she have?
The question torments her. She is not the most intelligent—that was always Charles Wallace. She is not the most charismatic—that is Calvin. She is not the most powerful—her father is a renowned physicist who can tesser across galaxies. What could she possibly possess that none of them do?
The answer, when it comes, is almost embarrassingly simple.
She loves her brother.
IT can do many things. IT can control minds, synchronize populations, eliminate all individuality and difference. IT can offer a kind of peace—the peace of surrender, the peace of no longer having to choose or struggle or doubt. But IT cannot love. IT does not even understand what love is. The concept is as foreign to that vast telepathic brain as color would be to a creature that has never had eyes.
Meg returns to the dome where IT resides. Charles Wallace is there, still enslaved, still speaking in that cold and sneering voice. IT tries to absorb her too, and the assault is overwhelming. She can feel her thoughts beginning to synchronize, her will beginning to dissolve.
But she focuses on her brother. Not on fighting IT. Not on her own survival. Just on Charles Wallace—the real Charles Wallace, the one buried somewhere beneath IT's control. She thinks about how much she loves him. She lets that love expand until it fills her completely, until there is no room left for anything else.
IT cannot withstand this. It is not a weapon that the vast brain has any defense against. Charles Wallace shudders, blinks, and returns to himself. The spell is broken.
Mrs. Which tessers both children away from Camazotz, and moments later they are standing in the woods behind their house on Earth. The Ws vanish. Dr. Murry and Calvin are already there, embracing the returning children. Mrs. Murry runs out to meet her husband, the father she has been waiting for through all the lonely months of his absence.
The family is whole again.
The Controversy That Followed
For a book that became a beloved classic, A Wrinkle in Time has generated a surprising amount of controversy.
Some Christian readers embraced it immediately. The novel quotes the Gospel of John, frames its central conflict as a battle between light and darkness, and names Jesus among those who have fought against evil. L'Engle herself was a devout Christian who described the book as her "psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death."
But other Christians objected strongly. They noted the mixing of Christian figures with non-Christian ones—Jesus appears alongside the Buddha in the list of darkness-fighters. They worried about the three supernatural beings who looked uncomfortably like witches. They found the book's theology too liberal, too universalist, too willing to blur the boundaries between Christianity and other traditions.
At the same time, some secular readers found the book too religious. The explicit mention of Jesus, the biblical quotations, the overtly spiritual framework all struck them as inappropriate for young adult fiction.
L'Engle was frustrated by both criticisms. She saw no contradiction between science and faith, between Christianity and a broader cosmic perspective. Her God was big enough to contain multitudes.
The American Library Association has repeatedly included A Wrinkle in Time on its list of the most frequently banned and challenged books in the United States. Parents have objected to it from both directions—too Christian, not Christian enough—for over half a century.
What Came After
The success of A Wrinkle in Time allowed L'Engle to continue writing. She eventually produced four sequels, forming what is now called the Time Quintet.
A Wind in the Door, published in 1973, shrinks the action to the cellular level—literally. Charles Wallace is dying of a mitochondrial disease, and Meg must journey into his body to fight the creatures causing it. The novel introduces the concept of Naming, the idea that knowing the true name of something grants power over it.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, published in 1978, sends Charles Wallace—now fifteen—through time to prevent a nuclear war. This book won the American Book Award and is considered by many readers to be the strongest entry in the series.
Many Waters, published in 1986, focuses on the twins Sandy and Dennys, who accidentally transport themselves to the time of Noah and the great flood.
An Acceptable Time, published in 1989, features Polly O'Keefe, the daughter of Meg and Calvin, who travels three thousand years into the past.
L'Engle also wrote numerous other novels exploring the Murry and O'Keefe families, creating an interconnected universe that spans generations.
The Adaptations
Hollywood took decades to bring A Wrinkle in Time to the screen, and the results were mixed.
A television film appeared in 2003, directed by John Kent Harrison. L'Engle reportedly disliked it, particularly the ways it simplified and altered her story.
A theatrical film directed by Ava DuVernay was released by Disney in 2018, with a budget of over one hundred million dollars. Oprah Winfrey played Mrs. Which, Reese Witherspoon played Mrs. Whatsit, and Mindy Kaling played Mrs. Who. The film featured a diverse cast and stunning visual effects but received mixed reviews. Critics praised its ambition and visual imagination while noting that the complex themes of the novel proved difficult to translate to screen.
Perhaps some books resist adaptation. The power of A Wrinkle in Time lies partly in what it asks readers to imagine—vast cosmic spaces, beings that exist beyond human perception, the interior experience of telepathic communion. These are easier to evoke in prose than to render in images.
Why It Endures
More than sixty years after its publication, A Wrinkle in Time continues to find new readers.
Part of its appeal is the character of Meg herself. She is not a chosen one, not a secret princess, not gifted with special powers. She is an awkward, angry, insecure girl who doesn't fit in and can't seem to do anything right. When she saves her brother and defeats a cosmic evil, she does it not through skill or destiny but through the simple, stubborn act of loving someone.
This is a radical message. It suggests that the most powerful force in the universe is available to everyone. You don't need to be brilliant like Charles Wallace or charismatic like Calvin or accomplished like Dr. Murry. You just need to be capable of love—and everyone is capable of love.
The book also speaks to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider. Meg's faults, which she sees as weaknesses, turn out to be exactly what she needs. Her stubbornness becomes persistence. Her anger becomes passion. Her refusal to accept easy answers becomes the skepticism that protects her from IT's seduction. The very things that make her different are the things that save the universe.
And then there is the vision of evil itself. IT is not a monster with claws and fangs. IT is conformity. IT is the erasure of difference. IT is the promise that life will be easier if you just stop thinking, stop choosing, stop being yourself. In 1962, this read as a critique of both Soviet totalitarianism and the gray flannel conformity of American corporate culture. Today, it resonates differently but perhaps even more powerfully—a warning about the seductive comfort of letting algorithms choose for you, letting feeds curate your reality, letting yourself dissolve into the frictionless sameness of a world optimized for engagement rather than meaning.
L'Engle wrote her psalm of praise to life, and life answered back. The book that no one wanted to publish became the book that millions of readers have needed. It arrives in childhood like a letter from the future, promising that being different is not a curse but a gift, that love is stronger than darkness, and that the universe—despite its terrors—is ultimately on the side of light.
Twenty-six publishers said no. They were wrong.