Last night, after learning that Madeleine L’Engle had died, I pulled A Wrinkle in Time from my son’s bookshelf. We had read it together about a year ago. I’ll confess that I didn’t love it at the time. I didn’t actually dislike it, and it does have some fine scenes, especially near the beginning. But I was happy to move on to another book when we were done.

Anyway, I reopened the book last night and reread the first sentence: “It was a dark and stormy night.” This is of course a sly reference to the most famous bad first line ever written, by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. Jay Nordlinger has written some fun columns, such as this one, on great opening lines. Last night, L’Engle’s put a smile on my face, with a first line that’s good because someone before her did it badly.

Bulwer-Lytton’s bad first line was actually more than seven words long. Here’s the whole thing:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Egad. L’Engle had the good sense not to continue past that semi-colon. Seven words is enough.

There is now an annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which writers create truly terrible first lines.