Novel
The Stone Angel
Margaret Laurence · 1964
Synopsis
A coastal town, in the early sixties. Hagar Shipley is ninety, with a body that betrays her and her pride intact. She lives in her house with her eldest son Marvin and his wife Doris, who can bear it no longer; a newspaper advertisement for a retirement home tells her what is being prepared for her. Between two surges of memory, in which there return the Scottish merchant who was her father, the farmer she married against his wishes and the son she preferred, she cashes a pension cheque and takes the bus, alone, towards a place by the sea.
Context
It is the first of the five books its author set in Manawaka, a small town modelled on the Manitoba one where she had grown up; she wrote it after her return from Africa. The angel of the title is a monument that a proud father had brought from Italy for his wife's grave. Everything is held together by the voice of a woman in her nineties who moves back and forth between the present and her memories. A film was made from it in 2007, with Ellen Burstyn.
Who it is for
A novel in the first person, which alternates without warning between the present and the memories of an entire life.
Prizes and reception
It has become a classic of English Canadian school curricula and established its author's reputation in Canada and abroad.
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