Places in The Works of Madeleine L'Engle - Austin Family Series

Austin Family Series

• Thornhill, Connecticut - the village near which the Austins live in most of the books. The Austin home is akin to the Murry farmhouse and to Crosswicks in size, age and environs; for example, all three have a "star-watching rock" out back. The Austin house is outside Thornhill, at the end of a dirt road that intersects the "old Boston Post Road". The Austins have an old barn, in which Vicky's brother John works on building a mock-up of a space suit. Dr. Austin sees patients a few evenings a week in his office at one end of the house, which has its own entrance. A short drive from the Austin house is Hawk Mountain (apparently a fictionalized version of Mohawk Mountain near Cornwall, Connecticut), another place the family goes to talk and look at stars. The nearby town is Clovenford, where Dr. Austin works at the regional hospital. The state in which Thornhill is located is not initially given, but in The Moon by Night John Austin tells Zachary Gray that the family is from Connecticut. L'Engle and her family, the Franklins, lived in a similar Connecticut locale when Meet the Austins was written. In a 1995 introduction to the Austin family paperbacks, L'Engle states that "Indeed, the Austins do a great many things that my family did, including living in a small dairy farm village." L'Engle also mentions Clovenford in a fictional incident in A Circle of Quiet (p. 87).
• Seven Bay Island - a fictional island about two day's drive from Thornhill, home of Reverend Eaton, Vicky's maternal grandfather, and of Leo Rodney. The exact state is not given, but L'Engle describes is as be "an island off the New England coast". Appears in Meet the Austins and The Moon by Night, and is the setting of A Ring of Endless Light. Seven Bay is reached by ferry, and is said to be the third and last stop on the ferry's outbound route.
• Vespugia - the fictional country in South America, first mentioned in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, is visited by Vicky Austin in Troubling a Star, en route to Antarctica. It is shown as having at least one step pyramid. More important to the book and the L'Engle corpus, Vespugia by the time Vicky arrives is no longer governed by El Zarco (Madoc Branzillo), the benign leader who replaced evil "Mad Dog" through the efforts of Charles Wallace. Instead, General Guedder (a descendant of the malevolent Gedder from A Swiftly Tilting Planet) has established a totalitarian regime, funded in part by international trade in illegal drugs. Guedder's Vespugia hopes to gain power in the world community by controlling and exploiting as much of Antarctica as possible. The name references the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the American continents were named. It is evidently a small country, "very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter" located between Chile and Argentina, who have been "nibbling" at Vespugia's borders for centuries. The Spanish Inquisition was once powerful there, torturing and killing the native Indians and destroying native religious sites and artifacts.
• Eddington Point, Antarctica - the fictional location of LeNoir Station, a small scientific research station staffed primarily by Americans in Troubling a Star. Eddington Point was named after Adam Eddington's uncle and namesake, a marine biologist who was murdered in Antarctica. The younger Adam is stationed there in Troubling a Star, but is mysteriously absent when Vicky arrives.