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Transcript

Today’s Advent window comes to us from the attic bedroom at Crosswicks, Madeleine L'Engle’s home in Connecticut, courtesy of her granddaughter, Charlotte Jones Voiklis. Who can forget the opening of A Wrinkle in Time?

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quit, Meg shook.

Charlotte shares with us a passage from Madeleine’s book, The Irrational Season.

Charlotte Jones Voiklis is the executor of her grandmother’s estate. She has written biographies of her and the afterword to the 50th Anniversary edition of A Wrinkle in Time. Learn more here.

In case you don’t know — or have forgotten — Louise the Larger is the telepathic pet snake in the Murry family’s garden in L’Engle’s Time Quintet.

I was honored to write the foreword to L'Engle’s Miracle on 10th Street And Other Christmas Writings. They were the focus of an Advent series I did here on The Cottage in 2020. I’ve always considered Madeleine L'Engle as one of the twentieth century’s finest poets of Advent and Christmas.


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There will be an Advent window TOMORROW — Saturday. Check your email. We’ll be visiting another author’s house for a special surprise!


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