An Archive of Poetry, Letters and a Play Written by Madeleine L'Engle by L'Engle, Madeleine

Clip-bound Loose Sheets. Near Fine. [New York and Connecticut]: [ca. 1965-68]. A first-person archive of material from Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007), including poems, personal letters and a play. Mostly 8.5" x 11" sheets with various smaller paper sizes clipbound in black cloth university spring binder with title ("Poems by Madeleine L'Engle") typed on embossing tape labels to upper cover. 146pp., including 11 holographic poems written on 11 pp.; 10 personal typed or handwritten and signed letters over 14 pp. written by L'Engle to her distant cousin Thomas Baltzell Brown and his Margaret Palmer Brown, and over 80 poems, concluding with a 27-page typed mimeographed play. Pages are otherwise in original type, carbon copies or photostat. Many pages were formerly folded and show light, age-flattened creases. Occasional toning and light edge wear, including wear to the left edges where they have been clipped into the binding. Though this was not an institutional copy, a university binder with a library bookplate present was repurposed and used to bind this collection. These poems appear to have been written in the mid-to-late 1960s, while L'Engle was an author in residence and living on the grounds of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, as many of them are typed on the verso of cathedral letterhead. L'Engle spent over four decades writing at the cathedral library, which led to it being designated a Literary Landmark. She was originally drawn to the the library as a quiet place to write after the publication of her Newbery Award-winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. As she wrote in an unpublished fragment, "I was writing in the bedroom of our apartment, not the best place in the world, with an actor husband apt to wander in and out. I knew about the Cathedral Library because I was one of the people who came into the beautiful, oak-paneled room to take out books." At one point in her residency, the librarian took leave for jury duty, and L'Engle even found herself filling that vacancy. Much of L'Engle's writings could be described in the same vein as that of C.S. Lewis--a blend of fantasy and adventure with a spiritual dimension, and often, the poems here are of a religious bent. Many of the poems present, such as "The Stripper," "Confession Shortly Before the 48th Birthday," "Songs from the Fiery Furnace," "Tree at Christmas," and "Sonnet After Thomas" to name a few, would later be published in a 2005 anthology, The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle. This archive concludes with a 27-page mimeographed typed play, here titled The Play of Jonah and the Beasts, with L'Engle's holographic notation to the top margin of the first page, "For Easter, 1965." This play would later be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1967 as The Journey with Jonah. A fantastic archive, which comes from the collection of Margaret Palmer Brown, of Portland, OR., wife of Thomas Baltzell Brown, Professor of Geography at Portland State University, who was L'Engle's cousin several times removed. Although their blood relation was several times removed, L'Engle and the Browns had a close relationship. This intimate and unique archive showcases the range of L'Engle's talents and her spiritual concerns at middle age.