The Canadian writer Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) was the author of many novels and stories about Africa and Canada. The five Manawaka novels feature strongly etched heroines and won international acclaim. Margaret Laurence (Jean Margaret Wemyss) was...

"The main concern of a writer remains that of somehow creating the individual on the printed page, of catching the tones and accents of human speech, of setting down the conflicts of people who are as real to him as himself," Margaret Laurence has...

Margaret Laurence, 60, the Canadian short story writer and novelist who had been a dominant influence on her nation's literature for a quarter of a century, died of cancer Jan. 5 at her home in Lakefield, Ontario. Mrs. Laurence was one of a...

Margaret Laurence Heart of a Straner ed. Nora Foster Stovel Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2003. Xxxiii+236. $29.95 Nora Foster Stovel's new edition of Margaret Laurence's Heart of a Stranger is an excellent and long-awaited reissue of Laurence's important collection of travel...

Five of Margaret Laurence's books [The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners] have Manawaka, a fictionalized re-creation of her hometown Neepawa, as their background if not their actual locale. But neither Manawaka nor Neepawa is "prairie" insofar as that word suggests endless plains where farmhouses sit solitary on the edge of their vast sections of the world's largest breadbasket. The essence of Manawaka is that it is small-town&#x...

[Margaret Laurence] often casts a gently ironic eye upon the more fundamental absurdities of the human condition, particularly the discrepancy between the idealized and the actual. In … "The Merchant of Heaven," her wry humor is apparent in the contrast between the glorious mission field of Brother Lemon's apocalyptic imagination and the trying reality of his day-to-day existence as an apostle for the Angel of Philadelphia Mission. Yet, in the largest sense, "The Merchant ...

Like Faulkner, who enabled his readers to experience the rural South in his novels of Yoknapatawpha County, Laurence has bestowed a kind of immortality on the small Canadian prairie town. Manawaka is not just a town from which one escapes as soon as possible; it has a further part to play in the lives of its emigrés. It cleaves to them just as its image stayed with Margaret Laurence in her years in England, a microcosm of her native country. (p. 95) In The Stone Angel, the first novel of the Manawaka...

A brief autobiography of the author Margaret Laurence, making reference to her collection of short stories in "A Bird in the House"