A Wrinkle in Time

Summary

Meg Murry is a stubborn, clumsy, unhappy girl with glasses and braces who is doing badly at school, and whose physicist father has been missing for more than a year on secret government work. On a stormy night she comes down to the kitchen of the family's country house to find her mother, a scientist, and her five-year-old brother Charles Wallace, an uncannily gifted child the village thinks is slow. They are joined by a strange tramp-like old woman, Mrs Whatsit, who has been stealing sheets from a neighbor and who remarks as she leaves that there is such a thing as a tesseract, the word for the concept Mr. Murry was studying. The next day Charles Wallace takes Meg to a haunted house where Mrs Whatsit's friends live: Mrs Who, who speaks in quotations from many languages, and Mrs Which, who barely appears as a shimmer. They meet Calvin O'Keefe, a popular older boy from a large, neglected family, who feels drawn there too. The three Mrs Ws take the children by tessering, a wrinkle that folds space and time, first to the beautiful planet Uriel, where Mrs Whatsit becomes a winged creature and shows them the Black Thing, a shadow of evil that covers some worlds and touches Earth. The Happy Medium's crystal shows that Earth is fighting it, and the children learn the names of some of the fighters, Jesus among artists, scientists and teachers, and that Mrs Whatsit was once a star who gave her life in the battle. Their father is imprisoned on Camazotz, a planet wholly given over to the Black Thing. Before leaving them there, the Mrs Ws give gifts: Calvin the ability to communicate, Meg her faults, Charles Wallace the resilience of childhood, and Mrs Who her spectacles. Camazotz is a town where children bounce balls in perfect rhythm and every door opens at the same moment, ruled from the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building by IT, a disembodied brain that speaks through the Man with Red Eyes. Charles Wallace, too sure of his own intelligence, lets IT into his mind and is taken over. With Mrs Who's glasses Meg reaches her father inside a transparent column, but when he tessers Meg and Calvin away from IT, Charles Wallace is left behind and Meg is half frozen by passing through the Black Thing. On the gray planet Ixchel, eyeless, furred beings nurse her, especially the one she names Aunt Beast. Meg realizes that she alone can return for Charles Wallace. Mrs Which tells her she has one thing IT lacks, and before IT's pulsing rhythm Meg discovers it is love: by loving her brother she breaks IT's hold and brings him back. All four land in the Murrys' garden, where Mr. Murry is reunited with his wife and the twins Sandy and Dennys. L'Engle wrote it in 1959–60; after many rejections it was published in 1962 by Farrar, Straus under its Ariel Books imprint, and it won the 1963 Newbery Medal.

Top Lessons

• Love is stronger than IT

  IT has unlimited knowledge and control but cannot love. Meg, with all her faults, wins her brother back by the one power IT does not have. The book does not make love vague: it is Meg's particular, costly love for Charles Wallace, held on to while IT's rhythm pounds at her.

• Alike is not the same as equal

  Camazotz has abolished differences: children bounce balls in time, the boy who misses is punished, and everyone is supposed to be happy. L'Engle shows that sameness enforced by power destroys the persons it claims to make equal.

• Faults can become gifts

  Mrs Whatsit gives Meg her own faults, her anger, impatience and stubbornness, and those faults are what keep her from giving in to IT. Meg does not have to become a different person to be useful; her character has to be turned toward the good.

• Pride of intellect

  Charles Wallace is the cleverest person in the story, and that is why he falls. Thinking he can enter IT's mind and come out again, he is captured. The final chapter's title, from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, says that God chooses the foolish and weak to shame the wise and strong.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Not a medical book, though two episodes are suggestive. On Camazotz IT controls minds by imposing a single pulsing rhythm, and Charles Wallace's capture, with its fixed, glassy eyes and strange voice, is described in terms that recall mid-century fears of hypnosis and brainwashing; the book treats it as spiritual and moral possession rather than illness. In Chapters 10–11 Meg is paralysed and numbed after the tesser through the Black Thing, and the beasts of Ixchel heal her by warmth, touch and song, a picture of nursing care that is restorative as much as physical. Any reading of these as clinical states is interpretive.

• Chapters 8–9

  Charles Wallace lets IT into his mind and speaks with its voice; Meg feels IT's rhythm pressing on her own thoughts.

• Chapters 10–11

  Meg, half frozen after passing through the Black Thing, is carried and nursed back to health by Aunt Beast on Ixchel.