Meet the Austins

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Meet the Austins
Meettheaustins.jpg
dust jacket to the 1960 edition
Author Madeleine L'Engle
Cover artistunknown (1960 edition)
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SeriesAustin family
Genre Young Adult
Publisher Vanguard Press,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Publication date
1960, revised 1997
Media typePrint (Hardback)
Pages191 pp (first ed.), 216 (1997 ed.)
ISBN 0-374-34929-0 (1997 ed.)
OCLC 35235132
LC Class PZ7.L5385 Me 1997
Preceded by A Full House: An Austin Family Christmas  
Followed by The Moon by Night  

Meet the Austins is the title of a 1960 novel by Madeleine L'Engle, the first of her books about the Austin family. It introduces the characters Vicky Austin and her three siblings, and Maggy Hamilton, an orphan.

Contents

Plot

Vicky Austin's noisy, loving, mostly-happy family is disrupted when the family's honorary uncle dies in a plane crash. His co-pilot was also killed, leaving behind a ten-year-old daughter, Maggy, who has no one to care for her. The Austins take Maggy in, and she proves to be a spoiled, troubled only child who had very little family life. Maggy encourages Vicky's sister Suzy to misbehave, which makes everyone's life more difficult. Meet the Austins is largely episodic; each chapter covers a specific incident such as Vicky's bicycle accident or a family vacation. Throughout the book, Vicky comments on the changes her family experiences during this time, and the reader sees her growing self-awareness. Although Vicky will later appear in three novels that have fantasy and/or science fiction themes, there are no such elements in Meet the Austins.

Characters

Rounding out the family are Vicky's father, Dr. Wallace "Wally" Austin, a doctor in general practice; her mother Victoria Eaton Austin, a retired singer; an uncle, Douglas Austin, a painter who occasionally visits; Aunt Elena, actually a close family friend who is the Austins' connection with the orphaned Maggy; and Grandfather Eaton, a retired minister who lives in a converted stable on fictional Seven Bay Island.

Series notes

Although Meet the Austins, as the name implies, is the family's first appearance in terms of the publication date, a short, later book, The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas (1964), takes place five years earlier. Another short Christmas story about the Austins, A Full House: An Austin Family Christmas , takes place about a year before Meet the Austins. A Full House was first published as a short story in two of L'Engle's collections, and then issued as a picture book in 1999. Meet the Austins is followed, in terms of internal chronology as well as publication date, by the full-length novels The Moon by Night (1963), The Young Unicorns (1968), A Ring of Endless Light (1980) and Troubling a Star (1994). Suzy Austin appears as a married adult in A Severed Wasp (1982).

Publication details

The 1960 first edition of Meet the Austins was published only after many rejections, reportedly because it begins with a death. The original publication left out a chapter about the children's "Anti-Muffin" club, which advocated diversity and portrayed the Austin children as having a close friend who was poor and Hispanic. ("Muffins" are a metaphor for conformity and snobbery.) This missing chapter was published separately in 1980 as The Anti-Muffins. In 1997, the hardcover publisher of L'Engle's novels from 1962 on, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, issued a new edition of Meet the Austins that for the first time incorporated the chapter. Paperback editions prior to 1997 did not include this additional material. However, the next book in the series, The Moon by Night , includes a scene in which Vicky tells Zachary Gray about the Anti-Muffin club, in very nearly the same text that introduces it in the originally-omitted chapter. The 1997 Square Fish paperback edition includes "The Anti-Muffins" as Chapter Five of the book. [2]

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References

  1. 1 2 L'Engle, Madeleine (1972). A Circle of Quiet. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. pp. 93, 153. ISBN   0-374-12374-8.
  2. L'Engle, Madeleine (1997). Meet the Austins. New York: Square Fish. ISBN   978-0-312-37931-5.