Her characters reveal, as she wrote of the Nigerian portraits, "something of ourselves to us, whoever and wherever we are."
Margaret Laurence was born Jean Margaret Wemyss on 18 July 1926 in the small Manitoba town of Neepawa. Of Scottish ancestry, her father, Robert Wemyss, also born in Neepawa, was a lawyer. Of Irish ancestry, her mother, Verna Simpson Wemyss, a native Neepawan, the daughter of a furniture dealer and an undertaker, was a talented pianist and music teacher. In 1930, at the age of thirty-four, Verna Wemyss died of a kidney infection. Her unmarried older sister Margaret returned from Calgary, where she had been teaching, to look after young Margaret. A year later Margaret Simpson married Robert Wemyss, and they had one son who was born in 1933. Two years later Robert Wemyss died of pneumonia.
In 1938 Margaret Simpson Wemyss moved the family into her eighty-two-year-old father's house, where she cared for him as well as for the two children. Young Margaret resented her grandfather's rigid authoritarianism. His strength was her "constant challenge to battle," as Clara Thomas has observed in her 1975 book The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence. "She was challenged, but certainly not crippled, by this old, still fierce and autocratic man; her stepmother's supportive love and encouragement and her own strong spirit, well-matched to her grandfather's strength, were constant, counterbalancing dynamics towards growth and achievement."
In 1944 Margaret Wemyss left Neepawa to take a scholarship at Winnipeg's United College, a United Church arts and theology college affiliated with the University of Manitoba.
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