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…. (p. 64)

This is not to deny, of course, that Margaret Laurence has a distinctively Canadian voice, nor that, though her concerns are of wider significance, they are deeply rooted in the local Canadian experience. (p. 65)

Before she could see her own place plainly, however, Laurence, like many other offspring of small towns, had to move away from home both physically and imaginatively. Born in 1926, she spent her first twenty-three years...