Lost ‘Love’: Rediscovered L’Engle Novel Arrives

By Krystyna Poray Goddu -- Publishers Weekly, 5/1/2008

Madeleine L’Engle, who passed away last September, a few months shy of her 89th birthday, published more than 60 books for adults and children, including numerous volumes of memoirs and spiritual writings. However, this spring there will be a new addition to her body of work: Farrar, Straus and Giroux is issuing L’Engle’s previously unpublished young adult novel, The Joys of Love.

Originally written in 1942 as a short story entitled “Summer at the Sea” and rewritten as a novel in 1950, The Joys of Love is an old-fashioned coming-of-age/love story. It features an orphaned Smith College graduate, Elizabeth Jerrold, besotted with the theater, who lands an apprenticeship at a summer theater and falls in love with an arrogant young director. L’Engle was always forthcoming about how heavily her fiction drew on her own life, but this early work is perhaps the most directly autobiographical, according to Léna Roy, L’Engle’s granddaughter, who contributed a personal introduction to the book.

“Elizabeth was as close to an autobiographical portrait as you could get,” Roy writes in her introduction. “Madeleine had spent two summers doing theatre in Nantucket and the setting for The Joys of Love is also at the ocean. Elizabeth, like Madeleine, went to Smith College and is impossibly well-read. Madeleine’s own father died when she was a teenager, and she describes Elizabeth repressing her grief, just as she had done.”

A zealous rewriter of her work, L’Engle reworked The Joys of Love three times. After initially writing the short story, she put it aside until 1950, when she was living in Connecticut with her young family. By then she had published two novels, The Small Rain and Ilsa, and her agent, Ann Elmo, was trying to sell Camilla, a young-adult novel. Elmo encouraged L’Engle to rewrite The Joys of Love for an adult audience, with more mature themes. “Gran liked having a strong editor,” Voiklis says. “But she always wanted to serve the work, and when she rewrote this, it had a totally different romantic arc.” L’Engle wasn’t happy with the adult version, Roy writes, believing that it “was much fresher as a young adult novel,” and put the manuscripts away.

Madeleine L'Engle.
Photo: Sigrid Estrada.

For Roy and her sister, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, The Joys of Love is an especially significant book. As girls, they were sometimes allowed to keep their grandmother company in what she called her “ivory tower”—her workspace at her Connecticut home, Crosswicks. “It was a privilege to be in that room,” Voiklis recalls. “Nobody else ever entered it. But we knew how to be quiet and read! She gave us the ground rules and we respected them.” One day, L’Engle gave the girls, then nine and 10 years old, the unpublished manuscript of The Joys of Love to read. In her introduction, Roy recalls lying on a couch with her sister in 1978 and passing her the pages as she finished each one. “We were honored that Gran thought we were mature enough to read this novel,” she writes, remembering that after they finished it, they were furious it had never been published.

“She always alluded to the fact that this was a very special novel to her,” Roy says now, “and that she wouldn’t share it with just anybody. This was exhilarating for us.” Was it their grandmother’s secret love story, they used to wonder? The sisters found several versions of the manuscript in spring 2006, when they were cleaning Crosswicks in preparation for renovation. “We were very excited,” Roy says. “We chose the best version to be published—the one we had read as kids.”

L’Engle, whose health was deteriorating at the time, gave Voiklis, her literary executor, her blessing to show it to her longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. L’Engle’s then-agent, Robert Lescher, sent it to Margaret Ferguson, editorial director of the children’s department, who had known L’Engle for many years. “I loved the manuscript,” Ferguson says. “It is romantic and evokes a period of time that somehow seems gentler, less complicated than today—yet the emotional content and feelings of the characters felt contemporary to me. Because Madeleine wrote it in the 1940s, it feels especially authentic to the times.”

Ferguson and Roy edited the manuscript together, tightening the structure slightly, and Ferguson asked Roy to write an introduction that would place it in the context of L’Engle’s writing career, and would also discuss its autobiographical nature. L’Engle, who was happy about the forthcoming publication, was concerned only that the story not be “modernized” too much, according to Roy. “Madeleine had a fierce loyalty to the work, not to trends,” Voiklis adds.

Unlike some YA novels published today, The Joys of Love has no sex, no violence, no drugs and only a tiny bit of alcohol. Teen Readers in YALSA’s YA Galley project, in which teenagers receive advance galleys in return for supplying feedback to publishers, have responded well, nevertheless, reports Ferguson. “I liked reading a sweet, clean romance that wasn’t about the characters’ eventual intent to ‘do it’ ” [quotation marks added], one teen wrote.

FSG plans an initial print run of 75,000, anticipating strong interest from L’Engle’s large adult following as well as from younger audiences, including, according to Ferguson, “teens who are involved in the theater and those who like historical fiction and romance novels.” The sizable print run affirms the publisher’s expectation that all readers, regardless of age, will agree with another YALSA reader who concluded, “This is the kind of book that you read on a rainy afternoon and when you are done, you sigh and feel satisfied.”

The Joys of Love by Madeleine L'Engle. FSG, $16.95 272p ages 12-up ISBN 978-0-374-33870-1