A short life of the author
Jean Margaret Laurence (18 July 1926 – 5 January 1987) was a Canadian novelist and short story writer who is, along with Alice Munro and Robertson Davies, one of the three pillars of twentieth-century Canadian fiction. Her five interconnected works set in the fictional Manitoba prairie town of Manawaka — The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), the story collection A Bird in the House (1970), and The Diviners (1974) — constitute the most sustained and deeply felt body of realist fiction in Canadian literature.
Early Life
Laurence was born Margaret Wemyss in Neepawa, Manitoba — the town that would become Manawaka in her fiction. Her mother died when she was four; her father died when she was nine. She was raised by her maternal grandfather and his second wife, her mother’s sister, in the same Scottish Presbyterian, prairie environment that permeates her fiction. She attended United College (now the University of Winnipeg) in Winnipeg and began writing for the college newspaper and literary magazine.
In 1947 she married Jack Laurence, a civil engineer, and accompanied him to British Somaliland (now Somalia) and then to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where they lived from 1950 to 1957. These African years produced her first published fiction.
The African Works
This Side Jordan (1960), Laurence’s first novel, is set in the Gold Coast on the eve of independence and examines the tensions between African and European communities during the transition from colonial rule. The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963) is a collection of short stories set in the same milieu. The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963) is a memoir of her years in Somaliland.
These works are notable for their sympathetic but unsentimental portrayal of African societies in transition. Laurence was one of the first Canadian writers to engage seriously with the postcolonial world, and her African fiction, though now less well known than the Manawaka novels, demonstrates the same qualities: precise observation, empathetic characterisation, and an instinct for the dynamics of power and vulnerability.
The Stone Angel (1964)
Laurence’s masterpiece is narrated by Hagar Shipley, a ninety-year-old woman, proud, stubborn, and unbending, who is losing her independence and confronting death. The novel moves between Hagar’s present — she is being pressured by her son and daughter-in-law to enter a nursing home — and her past, as she recalls the marriage, the losses, the disappointments, and the acts of pride that have shaped her long life.
Hagar is one of the great characters in English-language fiction — magnificent in her stubbornness, heartbreaking in her inability to express love, and profoundly recognisable in her refusal to surrender her dignity even when dignity is all she has left. The novel’s title refers to the stone angel in the Manawaka cemetery, erected by Hagar’s father over her mother’s grave — blind, unseeing, proud, and cold, like Hagar herself.
A Jest of God (1966) and The Fire-Dwellers (1969)
A Jest of God follows Rachel Cameron, a repressed, anxious schoolteacher in Manawaka who is trapped between her domineering mother and her own desperate need for love and escape. The novel won the Governor General’s Award and was adapted into the 1968 film Rachel, Rachel, directed by Paul Newman and starring Joanne Woodward.
The Fire-Dwellers is narrated by Stacey MacAindra, Rachel’s sister, who has escaped Manawaka for Vancouver but finds suburban married life its own form of entrapment. The novel’s fragmented, interior monologue style captures the chaos and anxiety of a woman juggling marriage, children, and a profound sense that her life is slipping away from her.
A Bird in the House (1970) and The Diviners (1974)
A Bird in the House is a collection of linked stories about Vanessa MacLeod, a girl growing up in Manawaka during the Depression and the Second World War. The stories are the most directly autobiographical of Laurence’s works and are among the finest short fiction in Canadian literature.
The Diviners, Laurence’s last novel, is her most ambitious: the story of Morag Gunn, a novelist from Manawaka, whose life encompasses the prairie, Scotland, Vancouver, and rural Ontario, and whose quest for identity involves confronting the histories — Scottish, Métis, Canadian — that have shaped her. The novel was controversial for its sexual content and was the target of book-banning campaigns in several Canadian school districts.
Critical Standing
Laurence is universally recognised as one of the greatest Canadian novelists. The Manawaka cycle is a sustained achievement comparable to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels in its creation of a fictional world that is at once intensely local and universally resonant. The Stone Angel is regularly cited as the greatest Canadian novel.
Her work has been criticised by some postcolonial scholars for the limitations of her African fiction, but her Manawaka novels remain critically unassailable — works of extraordinary psychological depth, moral complexity, and emotional power.
Collecting Laurence
Canadian first editions are the most desirable. The Stone Angel (1964, McClelland and Stewart) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$500. A Jest of God (1966) and The Diviners (1974) are less expensive. UK editions (Macmillan) and American editions (Knopf) are more affordable. Signed copies are rare, as Laurence was a private person who did not participate extensively in the literary marketplace.