by David » August 26th, 2006, 4:50 pm
I'm sure she read and had to have been influenced to a degree by Lewis's writings. "Steal" is not the right word. If that were so, William Shakespeare would be the worst literary thief in history, because only one of the stories on which he based his plays is original (that was The Tempest). Umberto Eco, novelist and literary critic, once said, "All books speak of other books and every author tells a story that has already been told." This influence (or intertextuality as it is called in literary circles) admits that literature is a continuum and that when authors write they inevitably refer back to works by other authors. So it is, I think, with Lewis and L'Engle. There are definitely threads of influence and language from one artist to the other.
The way, the weather, the terrain, the discipline, the leadership. --Sun Tzu