On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published a previously-lost three-page passage of Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 science fantasy book A Wrinkle In Time. L'Engle's granddaughter, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, discovered the passage, which was cut before publication, in her grandmother's draft of the book.

This missing section is unique and interesting in that it contains a more overtly political message than the rest of L'Engle's book, warning against both totalitarianism as well as an over-dependence on security in democracies.

A Wrinkle in Time follows a 13-year-old girl named Meg Murry, her brothers, and her friend Calvin as they search for Meg's father, a government scientist who disappeared during work on a secret experiment.

The children travel through space and time using what the book calls a "tesseract" and discover Mr. Murry on a planet called Camazotz, where the inhabitants live under the control of a single mind. Scholars have long considered L'Engle to have been influenced by the Cold War, but in the newly-published passage, the author seems to demonstrate more modern, nuanced politics. The newly discovered passage would sound familiar to Ars readers who have kept up with news about overreaches by the National Security Agency as well as federal and local governments. The Wall Street Journal describes the discovered text:

As Meg’s father massages her limbs, which are frozen from a jarring trip through space and time, she asks: “But Father, how did the Black Thing—how did it capture Camazotz?” Her father proceeds to lay out the political philosophy behind the book in much starker terms than are apparent in the final version. He says that yes, totalitarianism can lead to this kind of evil. (The author calls out examples by name, including Hitler, Mussolini, and Khrushchev.) But it can also happen in a democracy that places too much value on security, Mr. Murry says. “Security is a most seductive thing,” he tells his daughter. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the greatest evil there is.”

Many kids had their first taste of the science fantasy genre by reading A Wrinkle in Time as well as L'Engle's four subsequent books that made up the Time Quintet. The book has held up for generations, and a film adaptation for Disney is currently being written.

The Wall Street Journal asked literary scholars to look at the passage and they agreed that the narrative of A Wrinkle in Time was strengthened by cutting the passage. Still, it gives an interesting insight into the mind of a writer whose work has influenced people for over 50 years.