Anyone who has read many of Madeleine L'Engle's excellent novels for young people must hanker to know something about her, to find out why beautiful mothers and radiantly warm family life recur in her books, and why her female characters achieve fuller dimension than her male, and how she dares champion the forces of good in these dark times.

The chance to know her comes on like a Newfoundland puppy in "A Circle of Quiet," a long, loosely-structured, personal statement of her convictions, experiences, ponderings, self-analyses and philosophizings in which the reader discovers her discovering herself.

At age 51 Madeleine L'Engle is experiencing what [Carl] Jung called individuation, and she calls ontology—a coming to the real self. She employs the image of the burning bush—with everything non-essential burned away and only the real remaining—to describe the process she is undergoing and to justify culling her journals...