Margaret Laurence

In Hagar Shipley, Margaret Laurence has created one of the boldest, most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Raise according to the stern virtues of her pioneer ancestors, Hagar Shipley leads a life of uncompromising pride--a pride which sustained her during a stormy marriage, but which lost her favourite son. As her story unfolds we are given vividly etched descriptions of Hagar as a young girl in a remote prairie town; of her now estranged husband; of John, her outoing son; and Marvin, the son she never loved. And now, with her life nearly behind her, Hagar makes a bold, last step towards freedom and independence, and in the Process gains a deeper understanding of the meaning of acceptance.

The Stone Angel

Morag Gunn grows up in a small town on the Canadian prairie, escapes from an unhappy marriage, and returns to rural Canada in hopes of coming to terms with the past

The Diviners

One of Canada’s most accomplished authors combines the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up. In eight interconnected, finely wrought stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod – a world of scrub-oak, willow, and chokecherry bushes; of family love and conflict; and of a girl’s growing awareness of and passage into womanhood. The stories blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact. In this fourth book of the five-volume Manawaka series, Vanessa MacLeod takes her rightful place alongside the other unforgettable heroines of Manawaka: Hagar Shipley inThe Stone Angel, Rachel Cameron inA Jest of God, Stacey MacAindra inThe Fire-Dwellers, and Morag Gunn inThe Diviners.

A Bird in the House

James W. Nichol

A 90-year-old woman lives with her elderly son and daughter-in-law who are scheming to transfer her to a nursing home.

The ten stories gathered together in The Tomorrow-Tamer are Margaret Laurence’s first published fiction. Set in raucous and often terrifying Ghana, where shiny Jaguars and modern jazz jostle for eminence against fetish figures, tribal rites, and the unchanging beat of jungle drums, the stories tell of individuals, European and African, trying to come to terms with the frightening world brought about by the country’s new freedom. With the same compassion and understanding she would bring to her later fiction set in Canada, Laurence succeeds brilliantly in capturing the atmosphere of a continent and of individual men and women struggling for survival under the impact of the wind of change. From the Paperback edition.

The Tomorrow-Tamer

One of Canada's most accomplished authors combines the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up. In eight interconnected, finely wrought stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod - a world of scrub-oak, willow, and chokecherry bushes; of family love and conflict; and of a girl's growing awareness of and passage into womanhood. The stories blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact. In this fourth book of the five-volume Manawaka series, Vanessa MacLeod takes her rightful place alongside the other unforgettable heroines of Manawaka: Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel, Rachel Cameron in A Jest of God, Stacey MacAindra in The Fire-Dwellers, and Morag Gunn in The Diviners.

'An almost perfect book' Margaret Atwood. Rachel Cameron, thirty-four and unmarried, is trapped. A shy, retiring schoolmistress and dependable helpmeet to her overbearing mother, Rachel is desperate for love and companionship. When she risks all in a passionate affair, Rachel's life is changed in unforseen ways. A Jest of God is a powerful exploration of loneliness, desire and the heavy weight expectation bears on a life. Winner of the Governor General's Award in 1966.

A Jest of God

Stacey MacAindra burns – to burst through the shadows of her existence to a richer life, to recover some of the passion she can only dimly remember from her past. The Fire-Dwellers is an extraordinary novel about a woman who has four children, a hard-working but uncommunicative husband, a spinster sister, and an abiding conviction that life has more to offer her than the tedious routine of her days. Margaret Laurence has given us another unforgettable heroine – human, compelling, full of poetry, irony and humour. In the telling of her life, Stacey rediscovers for us all the richness of the commonplace, the pain and beauty in being alive, and the secret music that dances in everyone’s soul.

The Fire-dwellers

An account of the author's life among the nomads of Somaliland (also known as the Horn of Africa).

New Wind in a Dry Land

Sal decides to explore the contents of an old trunk in Grand's back shed. There she discovers a girl's winter coat. After she tries it on, Sal is transported into the past.

The Olden Days Coat

For years Rachel Cameron has dreamed of leaving her small town and her manipulative mother; but duty and caution have kept her at home. At thirty-four, she finally confronts passion and death, and realizes that she cannot continue to sacrifice love and freedom, but needs both to survive. Rachel's passage towards self-discovery is one we will reognize - one that is exciting, sad, funny, and true.

The Stone Angel, The Diviners, and A Bird in the House are three of the five books in Margaret Laurence's renowned "Manawaka series," named for the small Canadian prairie town in which they take place. Each of these books is narrated by a strong woman growing up in the town and struggling with physical and emotional isolation. In The Stone Angel, Hagar Shipley, age ninety, tells the story of her life, and in doing so tries to come to terms with how the very qualities which sustained her have deprived her of joy. Mingling past and present, she maintains pride in the face of senility, while recalling the life she led as a rebellious young bride, and later as a grieving mother. Laurence gives us in Hagar a woman who is funny, infuriating, and heartbreakingly poignant. "This is a revelation, not impersonation. The effect of such skilled use of language is to lead the reader towards the self-recognition that Hagar misses."—Robertson Davies, New York Times "It is [Laurence's] admirable achievement to strike, with an equally sure touch, the peculiar note and the universal; she gives us a portrait of a remarkable character and at the same time the picture of old age itself, with the pain, the weariness, the terror, the impotent angers and physical mishaps, the realization that others are waiting and wishing for an end."—Honor Tracy, The New Republic "Miss Laurence is the best fiction writer in the Dominion and one of the best in the hemisphere."—Atlantic "[Laurence] demonstrates in The Stone Angel that she has a true novelist's gift for catching a character in mid-passion and life at full flood. . . . As [Hagar Shipley] daydreams and chatters and lurches through the novel, she traces one of the most convincing—and the most touching—portraits of an unregenerate sinner declining into senility since Sara Monday went to her reward in Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth."—Time "Laurence's triumph is in her evocation of Hagar at ninety. . . . We sympathize with her in her resistance to being moved to a nursing home, in her preposterous flight, in her impatience in the hospital. Battered, depleted, suffering, she rages with her last breath against the dying of the light. The Stone Angel is a fine novel, admirably written and sustained by unfailing insight."—Granville Hicks, Saturday Review "The Stone Angel is a good book because Mrs. Laurence avoids sentimentality and condescension; Hagar Shipley is still passionately involved in the puzzle of her own nature. . . . Laurence's imaginative tact is strikingly at work, for surely this is what it feels like to be old."—Paul Pickrel, Harper's

Jason's Quest

Heart of a Stranger, originally published in 1976, is a travelogue chronicling Laurence's geographical journeys to many lands and places. She notes "I saw, somewhat to my surprise, that they are all, in one way or another, travel articles. And by travel, I mean both those voyages which are outer and those voyages which are inner."

Heart of a Stranger

Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet... Hagar Shipley – an irascible, independent nonagenarian – has lived a quiet life full of rage. As she approaches her death, she retreats from the squabbling of her son and his wife to reflect on her past – her ill-advised marriage, her two sons, the harshness of farm life on the prairie, her own failures and the betrayals and failures of others.

Up-to-date biographies with a list of works for each of the writers, detailed annotations to the original text and a glossary complete this edition."--BOOK JACKET.

Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952-1966

Long Drums & Cannons

Vivid, evocative, moving, The Stone Angel celebrates the triumph of the spirit, and reveals Margaret Laurence at the height of her powers as a writer of extraordinary craft and profound insight into the workings of the human heart. Margaret Laurence's most celebrated novel introduced readers to one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Hagar Shipley is stubborn, querulous, self-reliant, and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her, she makes a bold last step towards freedom and independence. As her story unfolds, we are drawn into her past. We meet Hagar as a young girl growing up in a black prairie town; as the wife of a virile but unsuccessful farmer with whom her marriage was stormy; as a mother who dominates her younger son; and, finally, as an old woman isolated by an uncompromising pride and by the stern virtues she has inherited from her pioneer ancestors.

Penguin Modern Classics Edition

NOW A PENGUIN MODERN CLASSIC: In this celebrated novel, Margaret Laurence writes with grace, power, and deep compassion about Rachel Cameron, a woman struggling to come to terms with love, with death, with herself and her world. Living alone with only her aging mother for company, thirty-something retiring schoolteacher Rachel Cameron feels trapped in a milieu of deceit and pettiness--her own and that of others. She longs for love and contact with another human being who shares her rebellious spirit, and when she has a summer affair with former schoolmate Nick Kazlik, she learns at last to reach out to another person and to make herself vulnerable. Poignant and singular, A Jest of God is an enduring work by one of the world's most distinguished authors.

'An almost perfect book' MARGARET ATWOOD. Whenever I find myself thinking in a brooding way, I must simply turn it off and think of something else. God forbid that I should turn into an eccentric. Rachel Cameron is a shy, retiring schoolmistress, tethered to her overbearing invalid mother. Thirty-four and unmarried, she feels herself edging towards a lonely spinsterhood. But then she falls in love for the first time, and embarks upon an affair that will change her life in unforeseen ways.

Margaret Laurence

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