Madeleine L'Engle, an American novelist, diarist and poet, produced over twenty novels, beginning with The Small Rain (1945), and continuing into the 1990s with A Live Coal in the Sea (1996).[1] Many of her fictional characters appeared in more than one novel, sometimes in more than one series of novels. Other major characters are the protagonists of a single title. This article provides information about L'Engle's most notable characters.
In a family tree chart first published inside the front cover of Many Waters (1986, ISBN 0-374-34796-4), L'Engle divided her major characters into categories she called "chronos" and "kairos", two Greek terms for different concepts of time. The stories of the Austin family take place in a chronos environment, which L'Engle defined as "ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time.".[2] These are presented in a primarily realistic framework, though occasionally with elements that might be regarded as science fiction. Kairos, the framework in which the stories of the Murry and O'Keefe families take place, was defined as "real time, pure numbers with no measurement", and often includes such elements as time travel, fantasy and religious content in a struggle between good and evil. A third category of characters, called by L'Engle "those who cross and connect", link the chronos and kairos stories in a latticework of appearances in multiple series of books, ultimately placing nearly every L'Engle character in the same fictional universe.