Margaret Laurence

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Standard Name: Laurence, Margaret
Birth Name: Jean Margaret Wemyss
Nickname: Peggy Wemyss
ML was a mid-twentieth-century Canadian who began to publish while resident in Africa, putting her gift at the service of preserving oral folk literature through translation and adaptation. Already a journalist, she next turned her hand to essays, short stories, and travel writing. She is best known for her series of Manawaka novels: explorations of the lives of women from a closely imagined prairie community, whose experience takes in the whole span of her century.
Black-and-white portrait photo of Margaret Laurence. She is wearing thick, dark rimmed glasses and has short hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Margaret Atwood
From 1957 she attended Victoria College , University of Toronto . Canadian publishing and the arts in Canada, broadly considered, had not yet recovered from the second world war. There were no cheap reprints of...
Fictionalization Catharine Parr Traill
CPT 's legacy to later Canadian writers is evident in Margaret Laurence 's The Diviners where Morag, the writer-heroine, imagines dialogues with Saint Catharine. Morag, who lives and writes on Rice Lake (as did...
Friends, Associates Ethel Wilson
In 1960 EW began a long correspondence with Margaret Laurence that lasted until her own death. Laurence, as an emerging writer, immensely valued the friendship, and wrote, I was starved for the company of other...
Friends, Associates Alice Munro
For years Robert Weaver , CBC producer, was AM 's only friend in the literary world. In the late 1970s she bonded with Margaret Laurence (with whom, a few years earlier, she had differed when...
Occupation John Donne
Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence signals the literary bent of her protagonist Morag Gunn in The Diviners by having Morag object to the sexist condescension conveyed by Donne's For God's sake hold your tongue and let...
politics Alice Munro
After her return to Huron County in 1975, AM became embroiled in cultural politics. Her Lives of Girls and Women was banned from a high school in Peterborough, Ontario, as immoral in early 1976...
Publishing Alice Munro
She found it hard to combine a literary career with raising her daughters, but her husband encouraged her because he believ[ed she] was a writer.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Margaret Laurence , already an established author, tried, but without...
Reception Margaret Atwood
Questioned about the number of older, female protagonists, MA denied that any homage was intended to Margaret Laurence 's The Stone Angel, and maintained that about half her narrators were male, but they passed...
Reception Mavis Gallant
Although contemporaneous with other Canadian authors who spent long periods abroad, including Margaret Laurence , Mordecai Richler , and Norman Levine , MGhas come to seem the complete expatriate in ways these others have...
Textual Production Margaret Atwood
MA has provided many introductions and paratexts for the work of other writers in poetry and prose, including an afterword for Margaret Laurence 's A Jest of God, reprinted in the New Canadian Library...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Atwood
She looks at what she calls the Grey Owl Syndrome—the envy and appropriation by white writers of native identity; at the web of stories surrounding the last expedition of Sir John Franklin ; and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Atwood
Subjects include English women writers Virginia Woolf , Antonia Fraser , Marina Warner , and Hilary Mantel , Americans Toni Morrison and Ursula Le Guin, as well as the reluctant Canadian Susanna Moodie and...

Timeline

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Texts

Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House. McClelland and Stewart, 1970.
Laurence, Margaret. A Jest of God. McClelland and Stewart, 1966.
Laurence, Margaret. A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose. Eagle Press (for the Somaliland Protectorate), 1954.
Laurence, Margaret. Colours of Speech: Margaret Laurence’s Early Writings. Editor Stovel, Nora Foster, Juvenilia Press, 2000.
Laurence, Margaret. Dance on the Earth: A Memoir. McClelland and Stewart, 1989.
Laurence, Margaret. Embryo Words: Margaret Laurence’s Early Writings. Editor Stovel, Nora Foster, Juvenilia Press, 1997.
Laurence, Margaret. Heart of a Stranger. McClelland and Stewart, 1976.
Laurence, Margaret. Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian dramatists and novelists 1952-1966. Macmillan, 1968.
Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. McClelland and Stewart, 1974.
Laurence, Margaret. The Fire-Dwellers. McClelland and Stewart, 1969.
Laurence, Margaret. The Prophet’s Camel Bell. McClelland and Stewart, 1963.
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. McClelland and Stewart, 1964.
Laurence, Margaret. The Tomorrow-Tamer: Short Stories. McClelland and Stewart, 1963.
Laurence, Margaret. This Side Jordan. McClelland and Stewart, 1960.