The Life Of Margaret Laurence

The Life Of Margaret Laurence PDF Author: James King
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307367215
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
The magnificent and long-awaited biography of the beloved writer who gave us the Manawaka novels, including The Diviners and The Stone Angel.

The Life Of Margaret Laurence

The Life Of Margaret Laurence PDF Author: James King
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307367215
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 573

Get Book Here

Book Description
The magnificent and long-awaited biography of the beloved writer who gave us the Manawaka novels, including The Diviners and The Stone Angel.

The Diviners

The Diviners PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: New Canadian Library
ISBN: 1551992434
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
The culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence’s celebrated Manawaka cycle, The Diviners is an epic novel. This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process – putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her. But in time, the aloneness that had once been forced upon her becomes a precious right – relinquished only in her overwhelming need for love. Again and again, Morag is forced to test her strength against the world – and finally achieves the life she had determined would be hers. The Diviners has been acclaimed by many critics as the outstanding achievement of Margaret Laurence’s writing career. In Morag Gunn, Laurence has created a figure whose experience emerges as that of all dispossessed people in search of their birthright, and one who survives as an inspirational symbol of courage and endurance. The Diviners received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for 1974.

The Stone Angel

The Stone Angel PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923878
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The Stone Angel, The Diviners, and A Bird in the House are three of the five books in Margaret Laurence's renowned "Manawaka series," named for the small Canadian prairie town in which they take place. Each of these books is narrated by a strong woman growing up in the town and struggling with physical and emotional isolation. In The Stone Angel, Hagar Shipley, age ninety, tells the story of her life, and in doing so tries to come to terms with how the very qualities which sustained her have deprived her of joy. Mingling past and present, she maintains pride in the face of senility, while recalling the life she led as a rebellious young bride, and later as a grieving mother. Laurence gives us in Hagar a woman who is funny, infuriating, and heartbreakingly poignant. "This is a revelation, not impersonation. The effect of such skilled use of language is to lead the reader towards the self-recognition that Hagar misses."—Robertson Davies, New York Times "It is [Laurence's] admirable achievement to strike, with an equally sure touch, the peculiar note and the universal; she gives us a portrait of a remarkable character and at the same time the picture of old age itself, with the pain, the weariness, the terror, the impotent angers and physical mishaps, the realization that others are waiting and wishing for an end."—Honor Tracy, The New Republic "Miss Laurence is the best fiction writer in the Dominion and one of the best in the hemisphere."—Atlantic "[Laurence] demonstrates in The Stone Angel that she has a true novelist's gift for catching a character in mid-passion and life at full flood. . . . As [Hagar Shipley] daydreams and chatters and lurches through the novel, she traces one of the most convincing—and the most touching—portraits of an unregenerate sinner declining into senility since Sara Monday went to her reward in Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth."—Time "Laurence's triumph is in her evocation of Hagar at ninety. . . . We sympathize with her in her resistance to being moved to a nursing home, in her preposterous flight, in her impatience in the hospital. Battered, depleted, suffering, she rages with her last breath against the dying of the light. The Stone Angel is a fine novel, admirably written and sustained by unfailing insight."—Granville Hicks, Saturday Review "The Stone Angel is a good book because Mrs. Laurence avoids sentimentality and condescension; Hagar Shipley is still passionately involved in the puzzle of her own nature. . . . Laurence's imaginative tact is strikingly at work, for surely this is what it feels like to be old."—Paul Pickrel, Harper's

Alien Heart

Alien Heart PDF Author: Lyall Powers
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553117
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
Today, almost two decades after her death, Margaret Laurence remains one of Canada's best-known and most beloved writers. Twice winner of the Governor General's Award for fiction, she was, as the late William French wrote, "more profoundly admired than any other Canadian novelist of her generation." Lyall Powers is both a respected scholar of literature and a lifelong friend of Laurence's, having met her when they were students together at Winnipeg's United College in the 1940s. Alien Heart is the first full-length biography of Margaret that combines personal knowledge and insights about Laurence with a study of her work, which often paralleled the events and concerns in her own life. Drawing on letters, personal correspondence, journals, and interviews, Lyall Powers discusses the struggles and triumphs Laurence experienced in her efforts to understand herself in the roles of writer, wife, mother, and public figure. He portrays a deeply compassionate and courageous woman, who yet felt troubled by conflicting demands. While Laurence's work is not directly autobiographical, Powers illustrates how her writing expressed many of the same dilemmas, and how the resolution her characters achieved in the novels and stories had an impact on Laurence's own life. Powers provides an in-depth analysis of all Laurence's work, including the early African essays, fiction, and translations, and her books for children, as well as the beloved Manawaka fiction. The study clearly shows the progression and expression of Laurence as a writer of great humanity and conscience.

A Jest of God

A Jest of God PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: New Canadian Library
ISBN: 1551993767
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In this celebrated novel, Margaret Laurence writes with grace, power, and deep compassion about Rachel Cameron, a woman struggling to come to terms with love, with death, with herself and her world. Trapped in a milieu of deceit and pettiness – her own and that of others – Rachel longs for love, and contact with another human being who shares her rebellious spirit. Through her summer affair with Nick Kazlik, a schoolmate from earlier years, she learns at last to reach out to another person and to make herself vulnerable. A Jest of God won the Governor General’s Award for 1966 and was released as the successful film, Rachel, Rachel. The novel stands as a poignant and singularly enduring work by one of the world’s most distinguished authors.

Heart of a Stranger

Heart of a Stranger PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888644077
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Travel was closely connected to Margaret Laurence’s creativity. Laurence realized that her travels, especially to Africa, provided her with new perspectives on Canada. Heart of a Stranger, originally published in 1976, is a fascinating travelogue chronicling Laurence's geographical journeys to many lands and historic places. She notes "I saw, somewhat to my surprise, that they are all, in one way or another, travel articles. And by travel, I mean both those voyages which are outer and those voyages which are inner." Laurence writes about her travels to Egypt in "Good Morning to the Grandson of Ramesses the Second," to Scotland in "Road from the Isles," and to Greece in "Sayonara, Agamemnon." In "The Very Best Intentions" Laurence sees herself as a "stranger in a strange land" in Ghana. She reflects on the many places she lived in "Put Out One or Two More Flags," "Down East," "The Shack" and "Where the World Began." Professor Nora Foster Stovel’s new introduction "Heart of a Traveller" explores how Laurence’s experiences in other lands influenced and shaped her writing. She contends that "Heart of a Stranger constitutes a concealed autobiography, for, in chronicling her literal life journey, Laurence also reveals her spiritual odyssey."

A Bird in the House

A Bird in the House PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923827
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
A Bird in the House is a series of eight interconnected short stories narrated by Vanessa MacLeod as she matures from a child at age ten into a young woman at age twenty. Wise for her years, Vanessa reveals much about the adult world in which she lives. "Vanessa rebels against the dominance of age; she watches [her grandfather] imitate her aunt Edna; and her rage at times is such that she would gladly kick him. It takes great skill to keep this story within the expanding horizon of this young girl and yet make it so revealing of the adult world."—Atlantic "A Bird in the House achieves the breadth of scope which we usually associate with the novel (and thereby is as psychologically valid as a good novel), and at the same time uses the techniques of the short story form to reveal the different aspects of the young Vanessa." —Kent Thompson, The Fiddlehead "I am haunted by the women in Laurence's novels as if they really were alive—and not as women I've known, but as women I've been."—Joan Larkin, Ms. Magazine "Not since . . . To Kill a Mockingbird has there been a novel like this. It should not be missed by anyone who has a child or was a child."—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette One of Canada's most accomplished writers, Margaret Laurence (1926-87) was the recipient of many awards including Canada's prestigious Governor General's Literary Award on two separate occasions, once for The Diviners.

Dance on the Earth

Dance on the Earth PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780771047473
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In a writing career spanning nearly three decades, Margaret Laurence became one of the most celebrated and widely read authors in the world. In this, her final work, Margaret Laurence reveals the story of her fascinating life, the process of her writing, and the people and emotional journeys which accompanied it. She relates her experiences living in different cultures; the issues and causes she so passionately upheld; her personal battle against censorship. She also pays tribute to the three women from whom she drew important spiritual strength. Including a selection of her articles, speeches, and letters - many never before published - and photographs selected by Margaret Laurence from her personal family albums, Dance on the Earth is a book of celebration and exploration in which Margaret Laurence speaks openly about her place in the world as a woman, a writer, and a concerned human being.

Margaret Laurence

Margaret Laurence PDF Author: Donez Xiques
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 1459714695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer is an engaging narrative that contains new and important findings about Laurence's life and career. This biography reveals the challenges, successes, and failures of the long apprenticeship that preceded the publication of the The Stone Angel, Laurence's first commercially successful novel. Donez Xiques demonstrates the importance of Margaret Laurence's early work as a journalist in her development as a writer and covers her return to Canada from Africa in the late 1950s. She details the significance of Laurence's "Vancouver years" as well as the challenges of her year in London prior to settling at Elm Cottage in Buckinghamshire, when Laurence stood on the verge of success. The Margaret Laurence known to most people is a public figure of the 1960s and 1970s; matriarchal, matronly, and accomplished. The story of her early years in the harsh setting of the Canadian Prairies during the 1930s - years of drought and the Great Depression - and of her African years has never before been chronicled with the thoroughness and vividness that Xiques provides for the reader. Appended to this powerful new biography is a short story by Margaret Laurence that has never before been published and two other stories that have not been widely available. They indicate the range of her concerns and show a marked departure from her fiction in The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories and A Bird in the House. Readers will benefit from the extensive research in this full and vibrant portrait of one of the most revered writers of twentieth-century Canadian literature.

The Fire-Dwellers

The Fire-Dwellers PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: New Canadian Library
ISBN: 1551993759
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Stacey MacAindra burns – to burst through the shadows of her existence to a richer life, to recover some of the passion she can only dimly remember from her past. The Fire-Dwellers is an extraordinary novel about a woman who has four children, a hard-working but uncommunicative husband, a spinster sister, and an abiding conviction that life has more to offer her than the tedious routine of her days. Margaret Laurence has given us another unforgettable heroine – human, compelling, full of poetry, irony and humour. In the telling of her life, Stacey rediscovers for us all the richness of the commonplace, the pain and beauty in being alive, and the secret music that dances in everyone’s soul.