Major characters in the works of Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle, an American novelist, diarist and poet, produced over twenty novels, beginning with The Small Rain (1945), and continuing into the 1990s with A Live Coal in the Sea (1996).

In a family tree chart first published inside the front cover of Many Waters (1986, ISBN 0-374-34796-4), L'Engle divided her major characters into categories she called "chronos" and "kairos", two Greek terms for different concepts of time.

The stories of the Austin family take place in a chronos environment, which L'Engle defined as "ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time.".

Kairos, the framework in which the stories of the Murry and O'Keefe families take place, was defined as "real time, pure numbers with no measurement", and often includes such elements as time travel, fantasy and religious content in a struggle between good and evil.

L'Engle's most important male characters (John Austin, Adam Eddington, Calvin O'Keefe and others) tend to gravitate toward science, or more specifically medicine (Charles Bejart, Dennys Murry, etc.).