Reading Madeleine L’Engle

Using a critical lens derived from ecopsychology and its praxis, ecotherapy, this book explores the relationships Madeleine L’Engle develops for her characters in a selection of the novels from her three Time, Austin family, and O’Keefe family series as those relationships develop along a human-nonhuman kinship continuum. This is accomplished through an examination both of pairs of novels from the fantastic and the realistic series, and of single novels which stand out as slightly different from the most prominent genre in a given series. Thus, this examination also shows L’Engle’s fluid movement along a fantasy-reality continuum and demonstrates the integration of the three series with each other. Importantly, through examining these relationships and this movement along continuums in these novels, the project demonstrates how ecopsychology and ecotherapy provide strong and important – and as-yet virtually unexplored – intersections with children’s literature.

Heidi A. Lawrence (PhD in English Literature, University of Glasgow) studies the intersections of ecopsychology and its praxis, ecotherapy, with children’s literature, taking special interest in imaginative and fantastic literature. She has published on Madeleine L’Engle and L.M. Montgomery. She works as adjunct faculty at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah), teaching in the English Department and the School of Education.