¥@¬É­^¤å¤å¾Ç­º­¶   /   §@®a  /  Margaret  Laurence  º¿®æÄR¯S¡D³Ò­Û´µ
Margaret  Laurence
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¹Ï¤ù¨Ó·½¡Ghttp://info.library.yorku.ca/depts/asc/Bios/mlwho.htm
¥D­n¤åÃþ¡GNovel
¸ê®Æ´£¨ÑªÌ¡GKate Liu (¼B¬ö¶²);Julia Hsieh
ÃöÁä¦rµü¡GWorld Literature; Canadian Literature

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Margaret Laurence

1926-1987

Julia Hsieh/Á¨Øæ¢;
Rachel Hung/¬x±ÓÖq
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A Brief Biography

 
Early Background

 Her Works

General reviews

Further reading

 
A Brief Biography 

Daughter of Verna Jean Simpson and Robert Harrison Wemyss, of Irish and Scottish descent, Margaret Laurence was born Jean Margaret Wemyss in the small prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba in 1926. Both parents died before Margaret was nine, and she was brought up by her mother's sister, Margaret, and her maternal grandfather, John Simpson. After graduating with Honors in English from United College (now the University of Winnipeg) in 1947, she worked as a reporter for The Westerner, a Communist newspaper, and The Winnipeg Citizen, a Socialist daily. In 1947 she married John Fergus Laurence, a civil engineer, and moved with him to England in 1949. The following year they moved to the British Somaliland Protectorate, where Jack Laurence was to supervise the construction of a series of dams. After two years in Somaliland, Jack Laurence's work took them to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where Jocelyn, their daughter, was born in 1952 and their son David in 1955. In 1957, the Laurences returned to Vancouver and remained there until Margaret and Jack separated. She moved to England with her children in 1962, living there for more than a decade, first in London and then in a village in Buckinghamshire.

Laurence's experiences in Africa inspired her over a period of some sixteen years to produce a variety of writings on African subjects. The first of these was A Tree for Poverty (1954), a volume of translations of Somali poems and folk tales, which was completed in Somaliland and evidenced Laurence's fascination with oral literature. In the introduction, Laurence stressed the role of oral literature in Somali life and offered Anglophone readers insights into that culture. Published in Nairobi two decades before Somalia adopted orthography, the book was reprinted in 1970 for Peace Corps Volunteers to Somalia, and again in 1993.

Laurence discovered in Africa the themes and concerns that would both mark her work and help her to understand her own Canadian roots (Florby 144). While living in Vancouver from 1957 to 1962, Laurence published a series of stories in Prism and other periodicals about the Africans she saw caught in a transition from an old tribal world to a modern one. Set in the Gold Coast, these stories were later collected in The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963). Three other books emerged from Laurence's African years. In 1960 she published her first novel, This Side Jordan, which deals with Ghana's struggle for independence. The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963), a travel-memoir, was prepared from the journal she kept while in Somaliland, and gives an account of her sojourn there during the early 1950s. It reveals Laurence as a writer with keen observation for local details and the trivialities of everyday life. Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists 1952-1966 (1968) is a critical study of the English-language writers emerging in Nigeria during its fifteen-year period of cultural renaissance, which came to an end with the onset of tribal warfare in the mid-1960s.

To readers in North America, Margaret Laurence is best known as the author of four novels and a collection of short stories set in Manawaka, a fictionalized small prairie town. While in Vancouver, Laurence completed a draft of her first Manawaka novel, which would eventually be published as The Stone Angel (1964). This book grounded her reputation as a major Canadian author. Her relocation to England led to a prolific decade in Laurence's writing career. This period saw another two Manawaka novels, A Jest of God (1966) and The Fire-Dwellers (1969), a semi-autobiographical collection of Manakawa short stories, A Bird in the House (1970), and a children's book, Jason's Quest (1970). In 1969 she bought a summer cottage on the Otanabee River, near Peterborough in Ontario, and most of the fourth Manawaka novel, The Diviners (1974), was written there. She was writer-in-residence at three Ontario universities between 1969 and 1974, and returned permanently to Canada in 1974 to make her home in Lakefield, Ontario.

The Diviners was followed by a collection of essays, Heart of a Stranger (1976), and three more children's books: Six Darn Cows (1979), The Olden Days Coat (1979), and The Christmas Birthday Story (1980). Laurence also authored several essays on the craft of writing, including “Ten Years' Sentences” (1969), “Time and the Narrative Voice” (1972), “Ivory Tower or Grassroots?: The Novelist as Socio-Political Being” (1978), and “Gadgetry or Growing” (a talk given in 1969-70, published in 1980). In 1987, Laurence died of cancer. Two years later, in 1989, her daughter Jocelyn brought to final form Dance on the Earth, a collection of evocative memoirs about the generations of women in the Laurence family.

        As one of Canada's most important writers, with five novels, five works of non-fiction, four books for children, and two collections, Margaret Laurence was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1971. During her lifetime, she received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Governor General's Awards for two of her novels, A Jest of God and The Diviners, and the Molson Prize in 1975.

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Despite certain controversy Margaret Laurence's works had aroused among her contemporary, the Canadians appreciate her devotion on the chronicles and a sense of nationality and national identity through her epiphanic writings.
 
 Early Background
 
  A. Family
    Born on July 18, 1926, as the only child to Robert Harrison the Scottish lawyer and Verna Jean Wemyss the Irish pianist in Neepawa, at the age of four, Jean Margaret Wemyss suffered the bereavement of losing her beloved mother, who died of kidney failure. Laurence was cared by her maternal aunt, Margaret Simpson, who quitted her teaching and moved to Neepawa to live with the Wemyss family since her younger sister's death. A year later, Laurence's aunt married Robert Wemyss and became her stepmother. Margaret and Robert Wemyss had a son, Robert, when Laurence turned nine. Misfortune loves company, Robert Wemyss died of pneumonia and left the twelve-year-old daughter and five-year-old son behind for Laurence's stepmother, also her aunt. Margaret Wemyss brought the children back to live with her father, John Simpson. There in Neepawa, Laurence and her brother lived together with their mother and the stern and domineering maternal grandfather..
   
  B. Education
   

Living with the autocratic old man like Laurence's maternal grandfather was not easy; she had revealed her resent over the old man's domineering rigidity that had tormented her when she was still a child. Thanks to her aunt/step mother, Laurence grew up in a loving and caring atmosphere, being indulged and encouraged in her own world of writing and reading. While in Neepawa Collegiate, she edited the school paper and had won Governor General's Medal for her good work. With a scholarship she earned due to her excellent academic performance, especially in the literature, she was admitted to Winnipeg 's United College , affiliated with the University of Manitoba. As an honors student in English, she made her debut in the undergraduate paper, Vox , and was strongly influenced by a left wing that buoys up social reformation. It was then Laurence began to write more sentiently with her observation towards humanity. This conscientiousness of writing and reflecting the reality helped her further in her post as a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen. ¡@

   
¡@ C. Nomadic life
¡@ ¡@ In 1947, Margaret Laurence married Jack Laurence, a civil engineering graduate of University of Manitoba. The couple stayed in Canada for merely two more years and then they left for England due to Jack Laurence's working post. In 1950, another post sent them to the British Protectorate of Somaliland (the present Somalia); there Jack worked on the dam project he was assigned to while Laurence began zealously involved in Somaliland oral literature: she thence spent most of the two years staying in Somaliland working with Somalis and editing a volume of translations of their literature, which later was published as A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose in 1954. During 1952 and 1957, Laurence moved to the Gold Coast (now Ghana ) with her husband who as relocated with his other dam project. By 1955, they had had Jocelyn and David, three and one respectively. The Gold Coast soon proclaimed its independence in the year of 1957 when Laurence was still working on her first novel, This Side Jordan. The Laurences returned to Canada and ended Laurence's odyssey in Africa.
   
¡@ D. A Room of Her Own
¡@ ¡@ Shortly after the Laurences came home to Canada , Laurence mourned for the death of her beloved stepmother. The family later settled in Vancouver , and Laurence had her first novel published in 1960. Back then, Laurence experienced unquiet and turbulent marital relationship with Jack Laurence. They soon separated two years later, and Laurence moved to a flat with her children in Hamstead , England. If the years can be regarded as her decade of writing the African novels and short stories, the year she spent in England , then, was the conclusive year of her publication regarding her African experience. Laurence had The Tomorrow-Tamer and The Prophet's Camel Bell published the following two years.

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 Her Works
¡@ The characters in her African stories were mostly aliens, and she told the stories through first and third person narrators. Feeling an alien herself in the land of dust, her experiences living in a remote foreign land prompted her interests in racial and gender equality, humanity and national identity. William French, the Toronto Globe and Mail critic, praised her profound portraits in her characters with an eye of realism and susceptibility.
 
A. Controversy and her Influence on Canadian Literature
   

The major issues in Laurence's works are about women, about national identity, social equality, racial discrimination and humanity. In her works, themes of exile, freedom and transformations forced by the paradox of order or disorder reoccur from time to time. Her women protagonists are often under scrutinization and always on the track of self-learning and self-discovery through constraining and dilemmatic living conditions. For instance, Laurence portrays the awareness and inner growth so as to transient changes in her female protagonists in a series of Manawaka novels. Laurence's women protagonists of all ages render her observant study and contemplation in humanity, like the ninety-year-old narrator in The Stone Angel moves little by little beyond her trapped body, and she transformed from the state of inertia to a learned old lady that eventually reached out more through reminiscence and the need of care and love. In her Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers , Laurence depicts two sisters confined in the domestic and social space step out to be contact with a world that they have never apprehended, and have a breakthrough in life and free themselves mentally and physically.

Through writing, Laurence accounts for her personal experience and meditation on life. The Diviners , which is regarded as her buildungsroman, once aroused controversy and attention in view of certain explicit portrayal of extramarital affair and abortion. Yet, Laurence's effort in faithfully record what she has perceived and concerned not merely brought her recognition from her literary contemporary, but made her a pioneer as a feminist in Canada. In her works, readers feel and think more through her reflective writings and sketches on humanity. Laurence herself also is a good model of life-long learning in terms of her posthumously published memoir in which she mentioned how the twinge she felt under the roof of her grandfather had turned out to be influential and prominent in her life. By the time she finished Heart of a Stranger , she revealed that her grandfather, "the repressive authoritarian figure," somehow made her realize the strengths the he stands for, the hardship he has been through and the pride he holds, which are all Laurence had had awe to and yet found herself in the same positions.

Throughout the history of her writing, her devotion on African literature made her realize the importance of people's conscience in national identity and racial equality; from the chronicle depictions of her imaginary Manawaka protagonists, she voices out her concerns toward gender equality and humanity as well as individual inner growth. Margaret Laurence is never simply a prize winning writers that writes communicatively and cogently, but as David Staines indicates, through her fictions, she brought "a wise sympathy for the plight of the individual in a young nation, an understanding of the need for myths that give shape to human lives, and an intense dedication to the depiction of contemporary Canadians in the pages of fiction" (Stain 9, Dictionary of Literary Biography).

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General Reviews

Laurence's greatest achievement lies in the four Canadian novels dominated by the town of Manawaka, which is not simply a fictional version of Neepawa, though similar in many details, but an amalgam of all prairie small towns infused with the spirit of their Scots-Presbyterian founders. . . . Although only A Jest of God is set entirely in Manawaka, the town . . . represents in each novel a constricting force to be overcome by the main characters. Insofar as it shapes each protagonist, Manawaka is an aspect of her own being that must be confronted from within; at another level the town is an emblem of life itself.

(Joan Coldwell, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature 634)

 

Many studies of Laurence's work focus on her five Canadian books, the Manawaka cycle. Historically, this is understandable because of the intense activity in Canadian letters that began in the 1960s and Laurence's place in that scene. However, Laurence belongs as well to world literature and the measure of her achievement must also include scrutiny of her five African books. Although she wrote before the development of Postcolonial studies, Laurence shows a deep and sympathetic understanding of the complex problems faced by postcolonial societies.

(Donez Xiques, Encyclopedia of Literature in /font> Canada 636)

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Reading Further span>

Gunnars, Kristjana. Crossing the Riverfont>. Winnipeg: Turnstone P, 1988.

Hind-Smith, Joan. Three Voices. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1975.

King, James. The Life of Margaret Laurence. Toronto: Knoft, 1997.

Lennox, John, ed. Margaret Laurence-Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993.

Lennox, John, and Ruth Panofsky, eds. Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.

Morley, Patricia. Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1991.

New, William. Margaret Laurence: The Writer and Her Critics. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977.

Nicholson, Colin. Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1990.

Thomas, Clara. The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975.

Verduyn, Christl. Margaret Laurence: An Appreciation. Lewiston: Broadview P, 1988.

Wainwright, J. A. A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters from Margaret Laurence to Canadian Writers. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant, 1995.

Warwick, Susan J. Margaret Laurence: An Annotated Bibliography. Toronto: ECW P, 1979.

Woodcock, George. A Place to Stand On. Edmonton: NeWest, 1983.

Xiques, Donez. Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer. Toronto: Dundurn, 2005.

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Works Cited

Coldwell, Joan. “Laurence, Margaret.” The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 633-35.

Florby, Gunilla. The Margin Speaks: A Study of Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch from a Post-Colonial Point of View. Lund: Lund UP, 1997.

Kertzer, J. M. “Margaret Laurence.” ECW's Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists. Toronto: ECW, 1993. 170-75.

“Margaret Laurence.” Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Vol. II.  Ed. Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars. Toronto: Pearson, 2009. 298-300.

"Margaret Laurence." Contemporary Authors. Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2001.

“Margaret Laurence.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Donna Bennett and Russell Brown. 3rd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2010. 608-09.

Morley, Patricia. Margaret Laurence. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Staines, David. "Margaret Laurence." Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol.53: Canadian Writers since 1960. First Series. Ed. W. H. New. Bruccoli Clark Layman Book: U of British Columbia. Gale Group, 1986. 261-269.

Staines, David. Ed. Maregaret Laurence: Critical Reflections. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press, 2001.

Thomas, Clara. Margaret Laurence. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1969.

Xiques, Donez. “Laurence, Jean Margaret.” Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. William H. New. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 634-36.

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