Lost “Love” rediscovered L’Engle novel arrives
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this spring there will be a new addition to her body of work: Farrar, Straus and Giroux is issuing L’Engle’s previously unpublished young adult novel, The Joys of Love.Originally written in 1942 as a short story entitled "Summer at the Sea" and rewritten as a novel in 1950, The Joys of Love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."
