Madeleine L’Engle came late to her profession. Although she never wanted to be anything but a writer, and although her earliest published works — a novel and a play — came soon after her graduation from college in 1941, it was only in 1960, with her children’s book, Meet the Austins, that her writing career took off. She went on to publish more than 50 novels for both adults and children and volumes of essays and verse.

The first page of Meet the Austins puts down something of a marker. Mother is cooking roast rib to the sound of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, her elder daughter is doing maths homework and her younger performing an appendectomy on a doll. Her elder son is in the garage constructing a spacesuit, and two dogs are present. The Great Dane is Mr Rochester and the poodle Colette. The atmosphere is redolent of cultured good cheer and before long grace will be said for supper and a prayer will be said before bed. The concern to show an integration of intellectual and spiritual values was to animate much of L’Engle’s later work.

Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in 1918. Her mother was a talented pianist and her father, a New York journalist, had been badly affected by gas while reporting from the Front in the First World War. They were affectionate parents, but circumstances required her to be schooled as a boarder in the US and at an English school in Switzerland. She then read English at Smith College graduating cum laude in 1941.

Taking the practical view that young writers need a diversity of experience, she worked in the theatre for several years, along the way meeting and marrying the actor Hugh Franklin. (Much repeated was her remark that she met him in The Cherry Orchard and married him in The Joyous Season.) They lived for some time in Connecticut where they ran a grocery shop, and L’Engle found that beans were easier to sell than manuscripts.

But the acceptance of Meet the Austins renewed her self-confidence and a couple of years later, after suffering numerous rejections, A Wrinkle in Time was finally published.

Classed as a science-fiction story — three children whisked by a “tesseract”, an imaginary four-dimensional device, to a planet ruled by a naked brain which has designs on the Universe — it was at first slow to sell, but after winning the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal in 1963 it swept to popularity and has remained not only her best-loved book but something of a landmark among American children’s books of the period.

Meg Murry, its protagonist, was an early example of a female lead in a tale of adventure (“I was Meg,” the author said) and the bold attempt to give the story a spiritual dimension — an assertion of the power of love — later drew opprobrium from religious conservatives who deplored a loose use of biblical doctrines.

From this time on children’s books formed the axis of her writing, supplemented by essays and reflections on the nature on religious life and by several novels. Her college novel, The Small Rain (1945), was adapted for children as The Prelude in 1963.

Many of her later books appeared as sequels or had a relationship to the science-fiction adventures of the Murry family in A Wrinkle in Time or to the family saga of the Austins. Ingenious in their plotting these nevertheless display what L’Engle herself termed a naivety — an undue “sweetness” — in their effort to cope with the large themes of human destiny.

Her devotion to Christianity was backed by a Jungian belief in the necessity of myth and concern at its loss in modern times, but, unlike her near-contemporary, the writer Ursula Le Guin, she was prone to assert such theses in a didactic way rather than incorporate them into the heart of her narratives.

Sweet though it be, her poetic treatment of the Flight into Egypt in the picture book with Symeon Shimin, Dance in the Desert (1969), offered its religious theme in more telling fashion.

Of the books in her Austin saga, the third, The Young Unicorns (1968), was perhaps her most successful attempt at a fusion of a modern mystery story with an examination of human flaws, and a dominant role is played in the book by the Episcopalian Cathedral of St John the Divine on Upper West Side in Manhattan. That was L’Engle’s church in New York where she became its librarian and writer-in-residence — public work which was matched by her widely appreciated presence as speaker or visiting lecturer at many institutions. She served also as a member of the board of directors of the Authors League Foundation and as president of the Authors Guild of America.

L’Engle’s husband predeceased her in 1986, and she is survived by a daughter and an adopted daughter. Her son, Bion, died in 1999.

Madeleine L’Engle, author, was born on November 29, 1918. She died on September 6, 2007, aged 88