A Study Guide for Margaret Laurence's "The Stone Angel"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Margaret Laurence's "The Stone Angel," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839785

Book preview

1

The Stone Angel

Margaret Laurence

1964

Introduction

Although Margaret Laurence had been publishing fiction for a decade before The Stone Angel was published in 1964, it was this novel that first won her a wide and appreciative audience.

In ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, the restless, crotchety, and proud protagonist, Laurence creates a memorable character who reveals what it is like to be very old, physically frail, dependent on others, and tormented by memories of the past. Laurence also movingly depicts the sudden dawning of realization in Hagar's mind of where she has gone wrong in life, and what has been the cause of her unhappiness. The novel suggests there is hope that even those most set in their ways can find the inspiration to change for the better, and that change, even at the last stage of life, is never wasted.

The Stone Angel is also a realistic portrayal of life in the prairie towns of western Canada from the late nineteenth century to the Depression of the 1930s and beyond. Laurence went on to write four more books set in the same region, and these, together with The Stone Angel, are collectively known as the Manawaka series. Critics regard the series as one of the finest achievements in contemporary Canadian fiction. The Stone Angel in particular has continued to win respect for its structure, in which present and past are interlinked, its language, which captures the forms of Canadian speech of the period, and the universality of its theme, which at its broadest is one character's search for self-understanding and redemption.

Author Biography

Margaret Laurence was born Jean Margaret Wemyss on July 18, 1926, in the small town of Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada, to Robert Wemyss and Verna Simpson Wemyss. Like Jason Currie, Hagar's father in The Stone Angel, Laurence's father was of Scottish protestant ancestry. And just as Hagar is raised without a mother, Laurence's mother died when Laurence was four. She was raised by her aunt, Margaret Campbell Simpson.

In 1944 Laurence won a scholarship to study English at United College in Winnipeg, where she published poetry and stories in the college paper. After graduation she worked as a reporter for The Winnipeg Citizen, and in 1949 she married Jack Laurence, a civil engineer. In 1950 her husband's work took him to the British protectorate of So-maliland (now Somalia) in Africa. In 1954, Laurence published a translation of Somali poetry, A Tree for Poverty. After living in Ghana from 1952 to 1957, the Laurences returned to Canada. Laurence's first novel, This Side Jordan (1960), and her collection of short stories, The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963) were both set in Ghana.

In 1962, Laurence