Meg Murry - As Meg Murry

As Meg Murry

Meg Murry is a stubborn teenager who hates being different, though different she is. She is a self conscious high school student in the first two books about the Murry family, and an adult in the third. She wears glasses, has dental braces and "mouse-brown" hair, and considers herself "repulsive-looking" and "dumb", although she is quite good at math. However Calvin O'Keefe describes Meg's eyes to be beautiful "dreamboat eyes." As a misfit with an odd younger brother and (in the first book) a missing father, she is defensive in her dealings with people outside her family, and unpopular with her peers and teachers.

In A Wrinkle in Time (1962, ISBN 0-374-38613-7), Meg longs for her father, who has mysteriously disappeared. She becomes friends with fellow student Calvin O'Keefe, who joins Meg and Charles Wallace in traveling by tesseract to other planets and provides Meg much-needed emotional support. Together they rescue Dr. Murry on the dark planet Camazotz. Meg ultimately rescues Charles Wallace from Camazotz as well, not through her own intelligence or strength but simply by loving him.

In A Wind in the Door (1973, ISBN 0-374-38443-6), Meg is much happier in school than previously, in part because of her friendship with Calvin. However, she is deeply worried about Charles Wallace, who has difficulty getting along with students and teachers and suffers from a mysterious illness involving his mitochondria. Meg tries to intervene on his behalf with Mr. Jenkins, the school principal, whom she still resents due to past conflicts. Meg learns to love and appreciate Jenkins, however, when she is given the task of "Naming" him and distinguishing between the principal and his Echthroi doppelgangers. Meg, Mr. Jenkins, Calvin, and a "singular cherubim" are then sent inside one of Charles Wallace's mitochondria to turn the tide against the Echthroi, the forces of Entropy and "Unnaming." Meg learns to appreciate the cosmic harmony and interdependency of macrocosm and microcosm. Meg also learns to "kythe" with Calvin and others, communing with them essentially by telepathy.

In Many Waters (1986, ISBN 0-374-34796-4), Meg is about nineteen years old, in college, and writing a paper entitled "The Million Doller question: the chicken or the egg, amino acids or their polymers." She is said to have a "long commute" to school, but apparently does not mind this because she "likes to drive." At the dentist with her mother and Charles Wallace as the book begins, Meg appears only in the book's final two pages. Her brothers Sandy and Dennys spend most of the story in the time of Noah, but refer occasionally to Meg and Charles Wallace as the "special ones" in the family.