The Door in the Wall
by Marguerite de Angeli
Summary
Robin, the young son of a noble family in medieval England, is about to begin training as a knight when a sudden illness leaves his legs paralyzed, stripping away the future he had been raised to expect just as his father leaves for war and his mother is called to attend the Queen. Alone and afraid, Robin is found and taken in by Brother Luke, a friar who teaches him to read, to swim, to whittle and, in time, to move confidently on a pair of hand carved crutches, insisting that when one door closes, another can always be found. Robin grows steadily more capable and less bitter under Brother Luke's patient teaching, and he is eventually sent to serve as a page in the household of Sir Peter de Lindsay, where he masters courtly duties and learns to play the harp despite his disability. When Welsh forces besiege Sir Peter's castle and cut off its supplies, Robin makes himself useful in the one way his legs cannot stop him: he swims the chilly river, slips past the enemy lines disguised as a simple minded shepherd, and reaches the minstrel John Go in the Wynd, who brings the help that lifts the siege. The book closes at a Christmas celebration where Robin's parents, along with the King and Queen, watch him accompany a carol on the harp he built for himself, honored not despite his disability but through skills it forced him to develop.
It is short and warmly told, and its sympathetic, unsentimental portrait of a disabled child finding his own kind of usefulness reads as unusually forward looking for its period.
Historical Context & Significance
The Door in the Wall won the 1950 Newbery Medal for a book Doubleday published in 1949, written and illustrated by de Angeli herself. That year's honor books were Rebecca Caudill's Tree of Freedom, Catherine Coblentz's The Blue Cat of Castle Town, Rutherford George Montgomery's Kildee House, Genevieve Foster's George Washington and Walter and Marion Havighurst's Song of the Pines.
The New York Times called it an enthralling and inspiring tale of triumph over handicap with unusually beautiful illustrations, and Kirkus praised the authenticity of its medieval pageantry, and its treatment of a physically disabled protagonist, unusual for children's fiction of its era, is regularly cited as an early, sympathetic example in a genre that mostly ignored disability altogether. It has stayed in print for more than seventy years and remains a common classroom text for units on the Middle Ages.