The Stone Angel (Phoenix Fiction) - Softcover

Laurence, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226469360 ISBN 13: 9780226469362

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1993

Synopsis

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

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

This special fortieth-anniversary edition of Margaret Laurence?s most celebrated novel will introduce readers again to one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Hagar Shipley is stubborn, querulous, self-reliant, and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her, she makes a bold last step towards freedom and independence.

As her story unfolds, we are drawn into her past. We meet Hagar as a young girl growing up in a black prairie town; as the wife of a virile but unsuccessful farmer with whom her marriage was stormy; as a mother who dominates her younger son; and, finally, as an old woman isolated by an uncompromising pride and by the stern virtues she has inherited from her pioneer ancestors.

Vivid, evocative, moving, The Stone Angel celebrates the triumph of the spirit, and reveals Margaret Laurence at the height of her powers as a writer of extraordinary craft and profound insight into the workings of the human heart.

From the Back Cover:

With her life nearly behind her, the witty, irascible, and fiercely proud Hagar Shipley escapes from her nursing home and sets out in search of a way to reconcile herself to her tumultuous past. Through her reflections, we come to know the rebellious young bride in a remote prairie town, her love for her two sons, the freedom she claimed, and the joys she denied herself. In this bold, final step toward freedom and independence, Hagar gains a deeper understanding of the meaning of acceptance. Her thoughts evoke not only the rich pattern of her past experience but also the meaning of what it is to grow old and to come to terms with mortality.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0226469360
• ISBN 13: 9780226469362
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 318