Madeleine L'Engle has published more than fifty books, including twenty-three novels, virtually all of them interconnected by recurring characters and locales. In particular, L'Engle's three major series have a consistent geography, including a number of significant fictional locations. These generally fall into two categories: Fictionalized versions of real locations, such as the homes of the Murry and Austin families. They are usually based on actual places L'Engle has lived. Exotic locations in other countries, on other planets and elsewhere, usually with a symbolic name that relates to a major feature of the locale. These places help to illustrate the themes of their respective novels. Major fictional locations in L'Engle's novels include the following places, grouped by the series in which they appear. Time Quartet On Earth The Murry farmhouse - Somewhere in New England. Starting and ending point for each of the books in the Time Quartet, plus An Acceptable Time. The Murry farmhouse, nearly two centuries old as of A Wrinkle in Time, contains a pantry that has been converted into Dr. Kate Murry's laboratory. As an adolescent, Meg Murry has her bedroom in the attic. Outside, a vegetable garden is tended by Sandy and Dennys Murry, who eventually grow Christmas trees instead once they go off to college. After the twins move away and the trees are sold, their parents reinstate the vegetable garden on a smaller scale. At the edge of the property is a stone wall, inhabited by a snake called Louise the Larger, and a glacial boulder called the "star-watching rock". In later years the house features an indoor swimming pool that connects to a "time gate", linking the present to a time approximately three thousand years earlier, when the area was inhabited by the fictional People of the Wind. Beyond this rural setting, small, worn-down mountains can be seen (based on Litchfield Hills), which according to An Acceptable Time were larger and snow-capped three thousand years ago. The house and the nearby star-watching rock have parallels in both the Austin family series of books and in L'Engle's actual Connecticut home, Crosswicks, a farmhouse dating back to 1770. Like the similar house owned by the Austin family, the Murry house lies outside a small village, served by a regional high school. Unlike the Austins' village, however, the one near the Murry home is not named in the books. Vespugia - a fictional country in South