A Wrinkle in Time Summary

A Wrinkle in Time has 12 chapters, all titled, and the first three simply introduce the three guides in turn:

• 1. Mrs Whatsit — the storm, the Murry kitchen, and a tramp in a pink stole blown in off the road
• 2. Mrs Who — the haunted house, and Calvin O'Keefe turning up on a compulsion he cannot explain
• 3. Mrs Which — the shimmer in the moonlit garden, and the departure
• 4. The Black Thing — Uriel, and the shadow on the horizon
• 5. The Tesseract — the insect and the skirt
• 6. The Happy Medium — the crystal ball, and the shadow reaching Earth
• 7. The Man with Red Eyes — CENTRAL Central Intelligence, and the multiplication tables
• 8. The Transparent Column — finding Dr Murry
• 9. IT — what is actually running Camazotz
• 10. Absolute Zero — the escape through the Black Thing
• 11. Aunt Beast — Ixchel, and the eyeless creatures who heal Meg
• 12. The Foolish and the Weak — Meg goes back alone

The last title comes from the passage Mrs Who gives Meg as a parting gift, from 1 Corinthians: God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. It is a thesis statement about Meg.

Two details of the printed book are worth knowing. The first sentence is "It was a dark and stormy night." — the whole first paragraph, and a deliberate joke, since it is the most notorious cliché in English fiction. And the three guides are Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which, with no full stop after "Mrs", while Mr. and Mrs. Murry keep theirs. L'Engle said the difference was important to her: the punctuation marks the human, its absence marks the celestial. She lost that fight in 1962 — a copyeditor put the periods back and she was too new an author to insist — and only got them removed in a 1993 reprint.

This A Wrinkle in Time summary opens in an attic bedroom during a storm, with Meg Murry awake and miserable. She has braces, glasses, unmanageable mouse-brown hair, and a permanent problem at school: she and her father used to play with numbers, so she knows too many shortcuts to do the arithmetic the long way her teachers demand. The principal has asked whether she enjoys being the most belligerent, uncooperative child in the school, and suggested she face facts about her father not coming back. She has already come home with a torn blouse and a bruise for hitting a boy who said something about Charles Wallace.

Charles Wallace is five, and the town thinks he is subnormal because he barely speaks to outsiders. In fact he reads his mother's mind and his sister's, and speaks with unnerving precision. He is downstairs heating milk when Meg comes down, because he knew she was awake. Their mother, a scientist with doctorates in biology and bacteriology, runs experiments on a Bunsen burner in the lab off the kitchen and cooks stew on the same flame. Their father, a physicist working for the government on the tesseract, has been gone more than a year, and the town gossip is that he ran off with a woman.

Then the door blows open and a tramp comes in out of the storm — battered clothes, a pink stole, wild nights are my glory — and, before she leaves, remarks that there is such a thing as a tesseract. Mrs Murry goes white. The next day Charles Wallace takes Meg to the haunted house in the woods to meet his friends, and they collect Calvin O'Keefe on the way: a tall red-headed basketball star, third of eleven children in a family that barely notices he exists, who came out to the woods on a compulsion. At the Murry dinner table he finds the first home he has known, and tells Meg she is the nicest thing that has happened to him in a long time.

That night Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which take the three children off the planet. What the guides actually are becomes clear on the first stop, the planet Uriel: Mrs Whatsit was a star, one that exploded fighting the darkness and won and lost her life in the winning. Later, when Meg cannot explain them to the creatures on Ixchel, Calvin supplies the word — angels. Mrs Who, who finds it hard to put things in her own words, speaks almost entirely in quotations from Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and scripture, always naming the source and translating. Mrs Which, the oldest, can barely materialise and speaks in stretched, doubled letters.

The tesseract gets its famous explanation on the way. Mrs Whatsit says travelling at the speed of light is the impractical, long way round, and asks Mrs Who to show them with her skirt. If a very small insect had to walk from the fabric in one hand to the fabric in the other, it would be a long journey — and then Mrs Who brings her hands together, and the insect is simply there. Charles Wallace walks Meg up through the dimensions: line, square, cube, then time as the fourth, and the tesseract as the fifth. Meg's response is the reader's: oh dear, I guess I am a moron, I just don't get it.

On Uriel they are shown something else. Mrs Whatsit carries them up a mountain and tells them to look at the horizon, and there is a darkness there blotting out the stars — the Black Thing — and Calvin whispers at her to make it go away because it is evil. Later, in the Happy Medium's crystal ball, they see Earth, and the shadow is on Earth too, and has been for a long time. Asked who has fought it, Charles Wallace cries out the first name, and then the children between them name Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Pasteur, Madame Curie, Einstein, Gandhi, Buddha, Beethoven, Rembrandt, St Francis. That list is what got the book banned in Alabama.

Camazotz is where their father is, and the horror of it is that it is not alien at all. Same birches and pines, same smokestacks, an ordinary-looking town — except the houses are identical small boxes, and outside every one a child is bouncing a ball or skipping a rope in exactly the same rhythm as every other child on the street. Charles Wallace bounces one boy's ball out of time and the boy snatches it back in terror; his mother goes white and says they have not had an Aberration in three years, and every door on the street slams at once. Later the children see that same small boy in a cell, being made to bounce his ball in rhythm and screaming each time it hits the floor.

At CENTRAL Central Intelligence the Man with Red Eyes speaks directly into their minds — soothing, reasonable, offering a planet with no illness and no unhappiness — and starts to hypnotise them by reciting the multiplication tables. Charles Wallace fights back with nursery rhymes and Calvin with the Gettysburg Address. Then Charles Wallace, sure he can enter the man's mind and come out again, lets himself be taken. What comes back has his voice and an alien smile, and calls Meg dear sister, and asks why she is being so belligerent and uncooperative — the principal's exact words.

The possessed Charles Wallace leads them to a cell where their father stands inside a transparent column, unable to see or hear them. Meg remembers the spectacles Mrs Who gave her for the final moment of peril, puts them on, and walks straight through the column into his arms. Then Charles Wallace takes them to IT.

IT is a brain. A disembodied brain on a dais under a dome, oversized just enough to be revolting, pulsing and quivering and commanding — and the pulse is the mechanism, taking over the heart and lungs of everyone on the planet so that resisting IT is the physical labour of breathing out of time. IT's argument is not cruelty. IT offers the end of illness, unhappiness and decisions, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that individuality is what causes suffering: differences create problems. Meg fights back with the faults Mrs Whatsit deliberately gave her — anger, impatience, stubbornness — and then with the Declaration of Independence, which produces the line the book is remembered for. Charles Wallace says Camazotz has complete equality, everybody exactly alike, and Meg realises: like and equal are not the same thing at all.

But holding out is not winning. Feeling all of them going under, her father tessers Meg and Calvin and himself away and leaves Charles Wallace behind. They come out on Ixchel, and Meg — dragged through the Black Thing without the glasses and without her father's practice — arrives frozen and paralysed and nearly dead. She is nursed back by tall, four-armed, tentacled creatures with soft indentations where eyes should be, terrifying to look at and the gentlest beings in the book. Meg cannot manage a name for the one who feeds and bathes and sings to her, and settles on Aunt Beast.

Her rage in these chapters is real and usually softened in summaries: she is furious with her father for abandoning Charles Wallace and tells him so, and wounds him badly. Aunt Beast defends her — the child is distraught, do not judge her harshly.

When the three guides arrive, Mr Murry offers to go back and is refused; Calvin offers and is refused. It has to be Meg, and she knows why before she is told: I don't understand Charles, but he understands me, I'm the one who's closest to him. Asked whether she has the courage to go alone, she says no, but it doesn't matter. Mrs Who takes back the spectacles because the virtue has gone out of them. Mrs Which carries her to Camazotz and gives her the strangest gift in the book — the information that she has something IT does not have, that it is her only weapon, and that she must find it for herself.

So Meg walks through the empty town asking what she has that IT hasn't. Resistance is no good, IT can resist. Anger nearly swallows her. Hatred is useless, IT knows all about hate. And then IT, speaking through her brother, overreaches and says that Mrs Whatsit hates her — and Meg answers automatically that Mrs Whatsit loves her, she told her so, and suddenly she knows. Love. That is what she has that IT does not.

What she does with it is smaller and better than the usual retelling. She first considers loving IT, and concludes she is simply not capable of it. So she loves the one person she actually can: she stands there without touching him and pours it at her brother, telling him he is her darling and her dear and the light of her life, over and over, until his mouth closes and his eyes stop twirling and he comes running at her, sobbing her name. Note that IT is not destroyed and Camazotz is not freed — she rescues Charles Wallace and Mrs Which tessers them out.

They land in the twins' vegetable garden, in the broccoli, and Charles Wallace laughs his own laugh again. Their father says he is very proud of his daughter, and then that he must get some new glasses in the morning, because Meg gave his away. Everyone runs into everyone; the dog comes straight through the screen door. Then Meg feels a flooding of joy, and the three guides appear, and Mrs Whatsit says breathlessly that they are sorry there is no time to say goodbye properly, because they have to — and there is a gust of wind and they are gone. The book ends mid-sentence, on a dash, and the reader never learns what they had to do.

The lines most often quoted from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, verified against the text:

"It was a dark and stormy night."

"Wild nights are my glory," Mrs Whatsit said.

"Meg, I give you your faults." / "My faults!" Meg cried. / "Your faults." / "But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!" / "Yes," Mrs Whatsit said. "However, I think you'll find they'll come in very handy on Camazotz."

"No!" she cried triumphantly. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"

"You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

"Mrs Whatsit loves me; that's what she told me, that she loves me," suddenly she knew. She knew! Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

A few notes on provenance. The opening line is L'Engle knowingly borrowing the most notorious cliché in English fiction, from Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford. Mrs Who's lines are almost all quotations of real authors — Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Euripides, scripture — so a good deal of what gets posted as "quotes from A Wrinkle in Time" is the book quoting someone else. And the enormously popular version of the sonnet quote that begins "Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet" is not L'Engle at all: it is a paraphrase from Anna Quindlen's appreciation printed in the front of current editions, which quote sites have absorbed and misattributed.