And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings (Genesis Trilogy) [Hardcover]

Madeleine L'Engle (Author)

Book Description

Series: Genesis Trilogy | Publication Date: March 7, 2000

AND IT WAS GOOD: Reflections on Beginnings by Madeleine L'Engle. Hardcover in dust jacket 213 pages Harold Shaw publishers, 1983

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Madeleine L'Engle is the author of more than forty-five books for all ages, among them the beloved A Wrinkle in Time, awarded the Newbery Medal; A Ring of Endless Light, a Newbery Honor Book; A Swiftly Tilting Planet, winner of the American Book Award; and the Austin family series of which Troubling a Star is the fifth book. L'Engle was named the 1998 recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards award, honoring her lifetime contribution in writing for teens.

Ms. L'Engle was born in 1918 in New York City, late in her parents' lives,an only child growing up in an adult world. Her father was a journalist who had been a foreign correspondent, and although he suffered from mustard gas poisoning in World War I, his work still took him abroad a great deal. Her mother was a musician; the house was filled with her parents' friends: artists, writers, and musicians. "Their lives were very full and they didn't really have time for a child," she says. "So I turned to writing to amuse myself."

When she was 12, Ms. L'Engle moved with her family to the French Alps in search of purer air for her father's lungs. She was sent to an English boarding school --"dreadful," she says. When she was 14, her family returned to America and she went to boarding school once again, Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina--which she loved. When she was 17, her father died.

Ms. L'Engle spent the next four years at Smith College. After graduating cum laude, she and an assortment of friends moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village. "I still wanted to be a writer; I always wanted to be a writer, but I had to pay the bills, so I went to work in the theater," she says.

Touring as an actress seems to have been a catalyst for her. She wrote her first book, The Small Rain, while touring with Eva Le Gallienne in Uncle Harry. She met Hugh Franklin, to whom she was married until his death in 1986, while they were rehearsing The Cherry Orchard, and they were married on tour during a run of The Joyous Season, starring Ethel Barrymore.

Ms. L'Engle retired from the stage after her marriage, and the Franklins moved to northwest Connecticut and opened a general store. "The surrounding area was real dairy farmland then, and very rural. Some of the children had never seen books when they began their first year of school," she remembers. The Franklins raised three children--Josephine, Maria, and Bion. Ms. L'Engle's first book in the Austin quintet, Meet the Austins, an ALA Notable Children's Book, has strong parallels with her life in the country. But she says, "I identify with Vicky rather than with Mrs. Austin, since I share all of Vicky's insecurities, enthusiasms, and times of sadness and growth."

When, after a decade in Connecticut, the family returned to New York, Ms. L'Engle rejoiced. "In some ways, I was back in the real world." Mr. Franklin resumed acting, and became well known as Dr. Charles Tyler in the television series All My Children. Two-Part Invention is Ms. L'Engle's touching and critically acclaimed story of their long and loving marriage.

The Time quintet--A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time--are among her most famous books, but it took years to get a publisher to accept A Wrinkle in Time. "Every major publisher turned it down. No one knew what to do with it," she says. When Farrar, Straus & Giroux finally accepted the manuscript, she insisted that they publish it as a children's book. It was the beginning of their children's list."

Today, Ms. L'Engle lives in New York City and Connecticut, writing at home and at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where she is variously the librarian and the writer-in-residence. "It depends from day-to-day on what they want to call me. I do keep the library collection--largely theology, philosophy, a lot of good reference books--open on a volunteer basis."


Author Fun Facts

Born
November 29 in New York City

Education
Smith College, The New School, Columbia University

Currently lives
New York City and Connecticut

Fun Jobs
Librarian, actress

Favorite…
…hobbies: traveling, reading, playing the piano, and cooking


A Special Message from Madeleine L'Engle

"I wrote my first story when I was 5. It was about a little G-R-U-L, because that’s how I spelled “girl” when I was 5. I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there wer wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn’t get along together, and what made people tick. That’s why I started to write stories.

The books I read most as a child were by Lucy Maud Montgomery, who’s best known for her Anne of Green Gables stories, but I also liked Emily of New Moon. Emily was an only child, as I was. Emily lived on an island, as did I. Although Manhattan Island and Prince Edward Island are not very much alike, they are still islands. Emily’s father was dying of bad lungs, and so was mine. Emily had some dreadful relative, and so did I. She had a hard time in school, and she also understood that there’s more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate. I love Emily. I also read E. Nesbit, who was a nineteenth-century writer of fantasies and family stories, and I read fairy tales and the myths of all countries. And anything I could get my hands on.

As an adult, I like to read fiction. I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.

I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death--that’s a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn’t finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein’s, in which he said that anyone who’s not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, “Oh, I’ve found my theologian, what a wonderful thing.” I began to read more in that area. A Wrinkle in Time came out of these questions, and out of my discovery of the post-utopian sciences, which knocked everything we knew about science for a loop.

A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I’d read to them at night what I’d written during the day, and they’d say, “Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!” A Wrinkle in Time” had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn’t done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don’t find, or didn’t at that time, in children’s books. When we’d run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That’s how it happened.

The most asked question that I generally receive is, “Where do you get your ideas?” That’s very easily answered. I tell a story about Johann Sebastian Bach when he was an old man. A student asked him, “Papa Bach, where do you get the ideas for all of these melodies?” And the old man said, “Why, when I get up in the morning, it’s all I can do not to trip over them.” And that’s how ideas are; they’re just everywhere. I think the least asked question is one that I got in Japan. This little girl held up her hand and said, “How tall are you?” In Japan, I am very tall.

I get over one hundred letters a week. There are always letters that stand out. There was one from a 12-year-old girl in North Carolina who wrote me many years ago, saying “I’m Jewish and most of my friends are Christian. My Christian friends told me only Christians can be saved. What do you think? Your books have made me trust you.” Well, we corresponded for about twenty years. I suggested that she go back to read some of the great Jewish writers to find out about her own tradition. Another letter asked, “We’re studying the crusades in school. Can there be such a thing as a Holy War? Is war ever right?” I mean, kids don’t hesitate to ask questions. And it’s a great honor to have the kids say, “Your books have made me trust you.”

The questions are not always about the books. They’re sometimes about the deepest issues of life. “Why did my parents put my grandmother in a nursing home?” That’s one that has come up several times. The letters are enlightening, particularly when t...

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Shaw Books; by Madeleine L'Engle. Hardcover 213 pages Harold Shaw publishers, 1983 edition (March 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877880468
• ISBN-13: 978-0877880462
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #691,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Madeleine L'Engle, the popular author of many books for children and adults, has interspersed her writing and teaching career with raising three children, maintaining an apartment in New York and a farmhouse of charming confusion which is called "Crosswicks."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, April 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings (Genesis Trilogy) (Hardcover)

This wonderful book is Madeline L'Engle's meditations on the Gospel of John and Genesis and how her sprituality relates to her life, bound up in a tale of her sea voyage on a freighter. It reads like much of her fiction, engaging rather than didactic. She does take some unusual approaches to the stories in Genesis, some of which I found a little disturbing, but basically I loved this book, and have reread it many times.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'And It Was Good'...is an understatement!, June 14, 2003

By 

Neville G. Kiser "NGK" (Pasadena, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings (Genesis Trilogy) (Hardcover)

This book wasn't just good, it was brilliant. So far, this is my favorite Madeline L'Engle book because she combines her own personal reflections with her fascinating fiction in a book that was hard to put down. I had to check the date twice to see that it was published in 1984....I was like, "Are you kidding, me?" It reads like it's more contemporary and timely than ever and that is always a good sign with any book (stand the test of time).

I heard about this book through a friend of a friend whom I didn't know and went out on a limb and bought it....and now, I think I may have found another author (apart from Brennan Manning) who is so challenging, insightful and exhilerating, you can't help but sit back, breathe deep and simply thank God for her words.

5.0 out of 5 stars THE TITLE SAYS IT ALL, July 22, 2011

By 

Bobbie Scott Thompson - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings (Genesis Trilogy) (Hardcover)

I live in Grace Presbyterian Village in Dallas, Texas. This is a retirement community like no other. I happened to see this book on a table one day when I was in the main building for my noon lunch. It was there again the next day after I was leaving Bible Study. When it was still there another day I decided that it had not just been forgotten by someone but was one of the many books available for the residents to read. Not knowing who it belonged to and intrigued by the title I took it home to read. I thought at first that it was just a book on Genesis, which to a certain extent it was, but it was more than that. It was more like a journey of the author which she was sharing with her readers. In reading the book of Genesis in the various bibles (mostly Gideon's left in rooms or cabins she happened to be in) L'Engle reveals as much about her life as she does about God's creation of the universe. When I finished the book I began to read it again which is something I have never done with a book before. I decided to see if I could get a personal copy for myself as I felt guilty taking something that I didn't know who it belonged to. The young man who was waiting on me at Barnes and Noble and checking to see about the availability of the book remarked that she was absolutely his favorite author however he was not familiar with this book. He was the one who suggested that I might be able to find it through this source. I asked if he had other books by her and he took me to the Young Readers section (a surprise to this 81 yr old "young" reader) where a boxed set of books including His personal all time favorite "A Wrinkle in Time" was the only one on the shelves. I bought it thinking that some of my young readers (grand and great grandkids) might like as birthday or Christmas gifts. The book I ordered arrived one day as I was talking with the Village Chaplain, Tom Tickner, who was about to start his vacation. We had just finished a study on Prayer which I thought he might find interested in L'Engle' comments and so I suggested if he had time to take the book to read when he had more opportunity. He had heard of her but not read any of her work. He returned this week and the first thing he said to me was that he loved the book. He asked if he might keep it awhile in order to make notes for when he begins our next study which will be on the "Lord's Prayer". I myself have begun reading the "Swiftly Tilting Planet" which is mentioned in the book and is definitely a little different style of writing but is thought provoking as well. I will tackle "A Wrinkle in Time" next to see if it is equally as different style of writing. It may be my younger generation relative readers will find it more their cup of tea. I think my daughter in law will like it for sure.
It is probably obvious by now why I titled this review as I did. Unless I had thought that is was good I would not have read it the second time so quickly nor would I have recommended it to my friend Pastor Tom whose opinion I value greatly His reaction that he loved the book is all the reason I need to feel that my take on the book was valid.