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Science fiction author Madeleine L’Engle died last Thursday at the age of 88. L’Engle broke down barriers when A Wrinkle in Time was published in the early 1960s, after being rejected by 26 publishers before Farrar, Straus & Giroux took a chance, according her obituary in The New York Times. Decades before JK Rowling raised the bar for positive female and feminist role models in “children’s" literature, L’Engle’s strong, realistic heroines gave girls and young women characters to admire and inspire, and introduced many to a lifelong love of science fiction. Feminist bloggers are noting how important L’Engle’s work was to them, grieving, and celebrating her contributions to science fiction, feminism, and faith.
Flyswallowfly wrote at Swallow. (“named after the great scientist Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”):
I have always loved science fiction novels and, as a child, fell in love with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I quickly scoured the local library for her other novels and grew to love each of them in return. To this day I credit my passion for science and feminism to the brilliance and inner strength of her characters.
Madeleine L’Engle died September 7, 2007 in Connecticut, but her legacy will survive through the inspiration her stories have provided for past, current, and future generations of young women throughout the world.
Zarah (aka the coffeegoddess) could not agree more over at The Sumatra Woman’s Brew:
How can I forget [L’Engle]? She gave me my first taste of Science Fiction through A Wrinkle In Time, a book that my mother chose for me from the shelves of the library of the old IS Manila in Makati. It was the book's feminist's pull that made its mark on my adolescent consciousness. How I adored Meg and her many eccentricities. At thirteen, I was, if not different, the weirdest girl in class. Madeleine told me not to worry. It's alright to be weird.
In her analysis of L’Engle’s book An Acceptable Time earlier this year, Michelle at I Am a Tree noted the changes in L’Engle’s female characters as her writing progressed:
Compared to the brash and self-depreciating heroine Meg was in A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, Polly is headstrong, determined and secure with herself. Maybe it is because Polly is older than Meg originally was, or has learned from her mother, that she is the way she is, but I also suspect it has to do with the eras in which the books were written: Many Waters, the final Time Quartet book, published in 1986, makes reference to some feminist ideals. (At one point, Sandy and Dennys talk about the “patriarchal society” in which Noah’s family lives. “Meg would call it chauvinistic,” one of the twins comments.) An Acceptable Time was published only three years later. Perhaps with the women’s movement, and the country’s changing ideas about women between the 1960s and the 1980s, L’Engle was moved to change her ideal heroine, as well.
Science fiction works well as a genre for feminists because it provides a format to explore alternate societies in which gender and sex are far less set in stone than in “real life.” According to research cited at Feminist Law Professors, women compose 52% of the printed science fiction audience. Certainly, much credit belongs to the fabulous female science fiction authors like L’Engle, Octavia Butler (who passed away last year at age 58; read a moving tribute to Butler by Gena Haskett at Out On the Stoop), and Ursula K. Le Guin. (For a longer list of important women in sci fi, including women who were in at the birth of the genre in the 1920s, check out Wikipedia.)
My thanks go out to L'Engle and others who showed us that there are many ways and paths that we can explore.
Suzanne also blogs about the alternative universe she inhabits at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants
