Sometime toward the end of 'the war' ... Father came home on leave ... and I was conceived. Because Father was sent immediately overseas, Mother was able to spend most of the nine months in bed. Even so, I am a witness to her determination. The first doctor she went to told her that she could not possibly carry a baby to term, and that if she did not have a therapeutic abortion, both she and the baby would die. Then she went to a Roman Catholic doctor.... So I am here to tell the story."
"[My mother] was almost forty when I was born.... Once she and Father had had their long-awaited baby, I became a bone of contention between them. They disagreed completely on how I ought to be brought up. Father wanted a strict English childhood for me, and this is more or less what I got--nanny, governesses, supper on a tray in the nursery, dancing lessons, music lessons, skating lessons, art lessons...."1
"I was terribly overprotected; I wasn't allowed to go out alone, and there wasn't a library near, so I simply had to read what my parents had, what I had been given, and when I had read everything four or five times I just started to write my own stories."2
L'Engle was well into adolescence and attending a "perfectly ghastly school," before she started to really do something about writing.
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