The Diviners - Softcover

Laurence, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0770421768 ISBN 13: 9780770421762

Publisher: Seal Books, 1984

Synopsis

Perhaps the best known and most loved of all Margaret Laurence's novels, The Diviners was also her last novel and the final entry in her Manawaka sequence. Laurence, who saw The Diviners as her own fictional autobiography, tells the story of 48-year-old Morag Gunn as she struggles to finish another novel. As she works, she reminisces about her life. It's her story but it's also the story of the men and women who have fostered her, for good and her parents, who died when she was five; her eccentric stepfather and his reclusive wife; her overbearing and repressive husband, who tried to smother her dreams to write; and the sensuous but unreliable Native lover who inspires her, with whom she bears a daughter and with whom she is never happy. The Diviners is Laurence at her most inventive. She incorporates flashbacks, personal reminiscences, imaginary conversations, and philosophical meditations, shifting between narrative and digression to give readers a sense of Morag's thought processes. The novel also incorporates the themes that mattered most to racial and gender equality, the validity of the Canadian literary experience, and the importance of artistic expression in society. The Diviners , which brought Laurence her second Governor General's Award in 1974, is a rich and striking novel, a fitting finale for Laurence's portrait of Manawaka. --Jeffrey Canton

About this title

From the Back Cover

The culmination of the Manawaka cycle, and Laurence's final novel, The Diviners is an epic tour de force. It is the story of Morag Gunn, an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. We follow her from her lonely childhood in a small town on the Canadian prairie through her demeaning marriage and escape from it into writing, fiction, and finally back to rural Canada, where she faces a different challenge - the necessity to understand, and let go of, the daughter she loves. Throughout, Morag is forced to test her strength against the world - and at last achieves the life she had determined would be hers. 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.

About the Author

Margaret Laurence was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Upon graduation from Winnipeg’s United College in 1947, she took a job as a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen.

From 1950 until 1957 Laurence lived in Africa, the first two years in Somalia, the next five in Ghana, where her husband, a civil engineer, was working. She translated Somali poetry and prose during this time, and began her career as a fiction writer with stories set in Africa.

When Laurence returned to Canada in 1957, she settled in Vancouver, where she devoted herself to fiction with a Ghanaian setting: in her first novel, This Side Jordan, and in her first collection of short fiction, The Tomorrow-Tamer. Her two years in Somalia were the subject of her memoir, The Prophet’s Camel Bell.

Separating from her husband in 1962, Laurence moved to England, which became her home for a decade, the time she devoted to the creation of five books about the fictional town of Manawaka, patterned after her birthplace, and its people: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners.

Laurence settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974. She complemented her fiction with essays, book reviews, and four children’s books. Her many honours include two Governor General’s Awards for Fiction and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Margaret Laurence died in Lakefield, Ontario in 1987.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seal Books
• Publication date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0770421768
• ISBN 13: 9780770421762
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 467