<i> Children’s</i> author? <i> Christian </i> author? Don’t try to label Madeleine L’Engle. At 73, she’s still . . . : Following Her Heart

GOSHEN, Conn. — Now, with her 40th book in print, it seems quite unimaginable that Madeleine L’Engle’s best-known work was nearly thwarted at the outset.

But “A Wrinkle in Time,” the book that became synonymous with this remarkably prolific writer, was resoundingly rebuffed when it made its rounds in manuscript 30 years ago.

“You can’t name a publisher that didn’t reject it,” L’Engle says, smiling.

She has come almost to covet the fault-finding that was heaped on this story about a girl who steps through time and space in search of her lost father. Her favorite was a librarian who blasted “A Wrinkle in Time” as “the worst book I have ever read.”

As a final desperate measure, the book was sent to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which published it as its first children’s book. “A Wrinkle in Time” won the 1963 Newbury medal for “the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature.” Its success made L’Engle “possibly the best-selling author we’ve had over the years,” says Stephen Roxburgh, her longtime editor and the publisher of books for young readers at FSG.

L’Engle is best-known as a children’s author, largely on the strength of “A Wrinkle in Time” and the so-called “Time Trilogy” it inspired.

But, likening her to the late Isaac Bashevis Singer--whom he also edited and published--Roxburgh lauds L’Engle as a writer who is comfortable writing for any age group.

“Certain Women,” published this month, represents only her fourth novel on an adult trade fiction list, Roxburgh says. But “in many ways,” he says, this allegory of the tale of King David represents “the most ambitious thing Madeleine has written yet.”

Like many of L’Engle’s admirers, Roxburgh bristles when asked to categorize this protean writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biblical criticism, essays and plays.

“There is no difference at all in the way she writes for adults or for children,” says Roxburgh, who also edited “Certain Women.”

Score one for L’Engle.

“I don’t ever write for children,” she says, seated in the dining room of Crosswicks, the 18th-Century farmhouse where “A Wrinkle in Time” came into being. “I write books.”

Pigeonholing her as a writer for young people is “insulting to kids,” she fumes.

And while many of her books have dealt with biblical themes and virtually all have delved into the realm of spirituality, L’Engle is equally uncomfortable with characterizations of her as a “Christian” writer.

“I hate that,” she says. “I don’t even know what it means. What I know is that I’m a writer who is struggling to be Christian.”

But at Wheaton College, a nondenominational evangelical school in Wheaton, Ill., Larry Thompson says the fact that L’Engle “writes so deeply out of her Christian conviction” prompted the school to invite L’Engle to establish a literary archive there.

“She hides behind nothing as she tries to relate her Christian faith to whatever it is,” says Thompson, the director of special collections at Wheaton’s library. “Knowing that she is loved by God, she can tackle all kinds of issues and let the chips fall where they may.”

But the very mortal nature of those issues--homosexuality and extramarital sex, for instance--and the entirely human way she often portrays characters inspired by the Scriptures enrages some in the Christian community. L’Engle once described Joseph as a “spoiled brat” and in her new book she makes little secret of the role of lust in the life of King David.

“There are definitely some people who would like to have her archives removed from here,” Thompson says.

To which Madeleine L’Engle replies, in effect, tough beans.

A woman approached her at one of the many Christian-themed seminars she conducts each year, she remembers, “and told me I must never criticize the characters in the Bible because they’re all good and moral.

“I said, ‘When did you last open your Bible? They’re all flawed!’ ”

She traces the spiritual sensibility that Stephen Roxburgh says “informs everything she writes” to a lonely beginning as an only child in a houseful of books. By the standards of people who had children 73 years ago, her parents were ancient--in their 40s--when she was born. Early on, she buried herself in books and determined that “the story is the vehicle of truth,” because “most stories, whether they want to or not, have a spiritual component.”

On what she calls “the asphalt island of Manhattan,” at an exclusive school (“which is still in existence, so it will be nameless”), L’Engle was ostracized by students and faculty alike. Her first problem was a physical one. With one leg longer than the other, she was clumsy and such a poor athlete that when sides were chosen, “the unlucky team to get me would let out anguished groans.”

But she also had the audacity to be inquisitive and academically iconoclastic. In mathematics, she challenged the teacher who told her that “three times zero was zero” as having uttered a statement on behalf of the forces of evil.

“I knew that if you started with three apples and multiplied them by zero, the first three didn’t go away,” she says. “To say that they vanished was to give power to evil.”

Luckily, L’Engle had a secret life outside school. She began writing at 5, spinning a story called “Gurl,” because she was too young to know she had misspelled the word. At Smith College she set to work on her first novel, “The Small Rain,” published when she was 24.

By then she was also acting, a career step she viewed as essential for an aspiring playwright. She met her future husband, Hugh Franklin--who died in 1986--when both appeared in a production of “The Cherry Orchard” with Eva LeGallienne.

“Two-Part Invention,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1988, is L’Engle’s tribute to their more than 40 years of connubial companionship. There were lean years, long years--but mostly, she relates, there were loving years. As newlyweds, they scraped up $6,300 (an almost unmanageable figure in those days) to buy the white clapboard farmhouse here.

During a prolonged down phase in the acting career of Franklin, who later gained fame as Dr. Charles Tyler on television’s “All My Children,” they ran the local general store. They raised three children, a son and two daughters.

L’Engle muddled through her 30s, a difficult period that she “couldn’t wait to be done with.” Four books in a row written during that period had gone unpublished. She was an anomaly, a working mother when “everybody mopped the kitchen floor. That’s why I put down carpet.” Still, from time to time, “I would get attacks of false guilt and think I should learn to make pie crust.”

Her domesticity was short-lived. One day, her oldest child announced, “You’ve been awfully cross lately. We think you should get back to writing.”

With her family’s encouragement, she set to paper an idea that had been brewing since she was 7 years old. Each night, she read aloud to her children from the story that became “A Wrinkle in Time.”

The tale of Meg Murry’s journey through the cosmos became a children’s classic that has gone through dozens of printings and has sold millions of copies. Catherine Hand, an independent film producer in Mill Valley, Calif., remembers how the book affected her.

“It was the first time I had ever read about good and evil,” Hand says. “I was 11 years old, and ‘Wrinkle in Time’ gave me this powerful tool, because I believed that evil could be overcome.”

A practical child, Hand “wrote a letter to Walt Disney, who was alive at the time, to tell him about this wonderful book that he should make a movie out of--and have me play Meg. But then I decided that he might not do it right, and that I needed to grow up and do it myself.”

Hand holds the option for film rights to “A Wrinkle in Time” and says she is “in discussion” with at least one major studio.

L’Engle and her family moved to Manhattan in 1962, settling into the huge, rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side she still occupies. Two granddaughters live with her, and three years ago, as her 70th birthday approached, one of them went into action.

“I mentioned that maybe we should have a little party, and before I knew it, Charlotte had sent out 400 invitations.”

So many people came that the party had to be held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where for many years L’Engle has had an office as the cathedral’s unpaid librarian.

L’Engle nurtures her spiritual side at the cathedral and on the religious retreats she conducts around the country. But she is equally attentive to her appetite for science--a staple in all her books.

L’Engle reads quantum physics the way most people read mysteries or romance novels. A recent visit to Antarctica sparked her passion for geology. When her best friend, a physician, sent her a scientific treatise on mitochondria, L’Engle was so fascinated by the rodlike structures found in cytoplasm that she wrote them into the manuscript of “Certain Women.”

If science infuses her work, so does her fundamental belief in the goodness of the universe. For her, science and spirituality are the guiding forces.

But her optimism is “not Mickey Mouse or Pollyanna,” according to Carole F. Chase, a professor of religious science who teaches a class on L’Engle at Elon College in North Carolina.

“Her last word is always positive, it is hope,” Chase says. Borrowing from a metaphor L’Engle uses in “Certain Women,” Chase explains, “Madeleine’s writing invites you to the wedding, to the dance, to the celebration. Many other contemporary writers invite you to the funeral.”

For L’Engle, there is no need to linger over lofty interpretation. It all comes back to an abiding confidence about the way the universe is structured.

“Ultimately, the God I believe in is not going to fail us,” she says.

“My faith is a total paradox, of free will and of the fact that actions do have consequences,” L’Engle continues. “My God is loving, and he’s not going to let us down.”