Abstract
The de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi holds valuable materials concerning Madeleine L'Engle, including her speech entitled ‘The Freedom of Service in the Life of the Writer’, personal letters sent from L'Engle to the University of Southern Mississippi, and the original, unpublished transcripts of A Wrinkle in Time. Within these transcripts is an alternate form of the ‘Aunt Beast’ chapter called the ‘Beautiful Beast’, important deleted passages concerning war and descriptions of ‘IT’, and a discarded chapter about a school planet that sheds light on L'Engle's intentions for A Wrinkle in Time. Because of these changes to the original transcript, reading the published version of A Wrinkle in Time causes one to not know for certain what L'Engle's overall objective is for the text. This paper presents an analysis of these new sources, and concludes that L'Engle's main theme for A Wrinkle in Time was to replace the mode of secure thought that contributes to the likes of totalitarianism, communism, and dictatorships with George MacDonald's concept of ‘Sacred Idleness’ and thinking with one's imaginative, subconscious mind.
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