Madeleine L’Engle Bibliography: Crosswicks Journals

The title of this book comes from the text itself: “Every so often I need out—away from all these people I love most in the world—in order to regain a sense of proportion. My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings… [there] I move slowly into a kind of peace that is indeed marvelous, ‘annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade.’”

This book is the attempt of a gifted woman to define and explore the meaning of her life, a life which, like that of many women today, is complex—that of wife, mother of three children, grandmother of two, teacher, frequent public speaker, concerned citizen, practicing Christian, and writer who has published seventeen books.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

“We aren’t persecuted very much nowadays, we Christians, at least not overtly. But in point of fact there is a good bit of sub-rosa persecution, ridiculing if not reviling… Those who look down condescendingly on us call this promise pie-in-the-sky and hope to demolish it by ridicule. The blessedness of being persecuted does indeed promise us heaven and we’re not, and we’re not very good about heaven. The problem with all that is promised the Christian, and it’s spelled out very clearly in the Beatitudes, is that it’s too good to be believed.”

But Madeleine L’Engle does believe, and shares her belief in a most personal, compelling way. The struggle to be human in the late years of the twentieth century, and with that humanity to find out what she believes about God and mankind, is offered to the reader with rare candor. To be a woman, a wife and mother, to have a career, involves conflict of all kinds: “But I am not at all convinced that life without conflict is desirable. There’s not much conflict in the grave, but while we’re alive the only creative choice is the choice of conflict.” The Irrational Season is a gifted woman’s journey through the seasons of the year—and the heart—to the fullness of Christian life.

A loving daughter has promised her mother that she will never put her in a “nursing home” when the old lady is no longer able to live alone. But after her ninetieth birthday, when she arrives in Connecticut to spend the summer with her daughter’s family, it becomes quickly apparent that atherosclerosis it taking its toll: the onoce-gentle Southern woman will not be able to make the trip home. This is the dilemma Madeleine L’Engle describes in this non-fiction book about the problems, crises, fustrations, and guilt engendered by her mother’s rapid slide into senility.

When the summer begins, there are four generations gathered together, and the great-grandmother of the title—wiity, imperious, beautiful, self-assured—is now a ruin of her former self. She is no longer the mother Madeleine L’Engle once knew. A “bouquet of young girls” has been assembled to take turns tending the old lady, but if she is not able to return home in September when the girls go back to school and the family returns to New York, what are the alternatives to a nursing home? What of the promise given? How is the pain of watching the ravages of senility to be endured?

Although this book looks realistically and unsentimentally at death in general, and the death of one person in particular, it is, ultimately, a book about life. It is a somewhat unconventional memoir of a dearly-loved parent, but it is much more; it is a book concerned wth the aged and the dying, a book that asks deep and searching questions, that examines and condemns many of the attitudes and values in our society. there are books—perhaps good and neccessary books—that speak out for “euthanasia,” “death with dignity,” “compassion for the aged,” but such books are usually analytical, theoretical, or polemical. The Summer of the Great-Grandmother is about people—human beings, young, old, loving, grieving, declining, growing, dying—and will speak powefully to everyone who has, or has lost, an elderly parent.

This moving memoir documents a marriage of more than forty years between two gifted people (Madeleine L’Engle and her actor husband Hugh Franklin), a long term marriage that was: “full of wonderful things, terrible things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours.”