Meg Murry - Dating The Books

Dating The Books

The chronology of the Murry-O'Keefe books is problematic at best, largely because the books about Meg and her various family members were written over a period of decades. Any attempt to tie character events and ages to real world chronology results in discrepancies, such as the first moon landing being mentioned (in A Wind in the Door) as taking place well before A Wrinkle in Time, while 14-year-old Polly O'Keefe makes reference, about 28 years after Wrinkle (in Dragons in the Waters), to the present as being the "end of the twentieth century". The Austin family book A Severed Wasp, which should take place over twenty years after Dragons based on character chronologies, makes the same end-of-century references. L'Engle refers to these stories as taking place in Kairos, which she defines in the front of the Many Waters hardback as "real time, pure numbers with no measurement" instead of "ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time." Nevertheless, it is possible to determine a plausible (albeit arbitrary) approximate date of 1970 for the events of A Wrinkle in Time. This would give Meg an approximate birth date of 1956. If Meg is 14 in A Wrinkle in Time (which is not definitively established in the book or elsewhere), then she is about 15 in A Wind in the Door, about 19 in Many Waters, about 24 in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, about 36 in The Arm of the Starfish, and about 42 as of An Acceptable Time. Reports about the unfinished book about Meg, The Eye Begins to See, place Meg as being in her forties or fifties.