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The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
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The Stone Angel (original 1964; edition 2004)

by Margaret Laurence

Series: Manawaka cycle (1)

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1,736449,887 (3.83)323
The film adaptation of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, starring acclaimed actresses Ellen Burstyn and Ellen Page, and introducing Christine Horne, opens in theatres May 9, 2008. 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.… (more)
Member:ksmrt
Title:The Stone Angel
Authors:Margaret Laurence
Info:McClelland & Stewart (2004), Paperback, 344 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:****
Tags:canada, women, old age, death

Work Information

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence (1964)

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Showing 1-5 of 41 (next | show all)
Why is it that those teaching high school and undergraduate English literature courses persist in assigning Margaret Laurence? Do they want to instil a lifetime aversion to her works?

Luckily for me, Can Lit was never on any curriculum in my studies. Reading The Stone Angel, I was really glad I hadn't read it earlier in life, as much of the novel would have escaped me. I would never have realized the sheer devastation of it all, and how deftly Laurence portrays it.

The very first sentence speaks of a stone angel high above the town, the monument young Hagar Currie's father had had erected to his wife after she died giving birth to Hagar. Thereafter, the angel is always described as marble. It is Hagar who is the woman of stone, unmoving and unable to see the devastation she wreaks around her. It was not until after her adult son's death that she finally realized it. The night my son died I was transformed to stone.

Like a stone angel, Hagar is unyielding. Yet at the same time she was so afraid of others in that "What will the neighbours think?" way. Like the angel, she is unseeing, not recognizing the need of others for love and approval. Her young son Marvin would linger at the kitchen door each evening with his refrain of "I've finished the chores", only to be shooed away. His younger brother John lied to her to please and deceive her, going so far as to invent respectable imaginary friends. Her husband Bram never heard an "I love you", and never knew how much she actually enjoyed sex with him.

The reader only gets to know Hagar through her own words. Now ninety and dementing, she is on the one hand an unreliable narrator, while at the same time completely credible as she reveals herself. Querulous, lacking in empathy, and very strong willed, she insists on remaining with her son and daughter-in-law when they themselves are in failing health.

Hospitalized after a defiant episode, Hagar, a non believer, found herself trapped into a visit from a minister. As he sang a hymn to her about rejoicing, the need to rejoice came to her as a revelation.When did I ever speak the heart's truth?
Pride was my wilderness and the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, never anything else, and never free, for I carried my chains with me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched.


Still, nothing changed. There is no sappy ending. That is not Margaret Laurence's style. Hagar may have been granted a moment of insight, but she dismissed it immediately, afraid yet again to examine her life.

Laurence wrote The Stone Angel when she was in her mid thirties. It is an astonishing insight into a character decades older. She feared her publisher would not accept the novel; ninety year old unsympathetic protagonists are a hard sell.

Writing to her good friend Adele Wiseman, with her thoughts about her novel, she quoted Martin Luther: Here I stand; God help me, I can do no other.

She may have been thinking of herself, but she managed to sum up Hagar completely.
  SassyLassy | Nov 15, 2023 |
Somewhat grim but insightful and with moments of humor. What a deeply felt portrait, I can see why it's endured. From my notes, something in here reminded me of Hirschfield's Standing Deer.
(Note, as always: 3 stars means I liked it! If you rate everything you like 5 stars, then adjust mine accordingly in your mind.) ( )
  Kiramke | Jun 27, 2023 |
I had not heard of Margaret Laurence until I saw her name on the cover of a used book. That book was The Stone Angel, and the limited research that followed told me that Ms. Laurence was one of Canada’s most celebrated authors. I’m not surprised at my ignorance; even though I was raised in Michigan, the world may as well have ended at the very top of Lake Superior for the amount of Canadian non-hockey information that was shared with us in school.

I was intrigued, of course, to discover a new-to-me Canadian author. I bought and read the book. I was introduced to Hagar Currie Shipley, ninety and full of spark. I met her father and brothers, her husband Bram, her nemesis Lottie, her sons Marvin and John and her daughter-in-law Doris. I knew Hagar as a child, teen, bride, wife, mother, and widow, and I watched as, at the age of ninety, she managed to escape the clutches of her children in an attempt to gain her freedom at last.

There is no question that the book is well-written, rich in authentic emotion and detailed descriptions of nature. The symbolism is profound, if the reader is watching for it, and the characterization is excellent. (That Doris – what a pill.) The author sketches scenes of profound pain without ever using the word “pain.”

I wish I hadn’t read it.

I finished the book about half an hour ago, and the sadness hasn’t lifted yet. I suppose that’s a mark in the author’s favor; she has painted characters and events in a way that pulled me into their unfolding. Hagar could be any one of us. Her life is not a happy one, but it’s not tragic for the most part; she loses some family members, but the losses are described with a minimum of fuss and her husband is distant, but not cruel or abusive. Hagar, in the end, is an acerbic, slightly unpleasant woman who lives a life much like the life of any early 20th-century prairie farmer’s wife. She could have been my great grandmother; she could have been me. And that’s why I’m sad – becasue conversely, I could be her.

Regardless of my mood during and shortly after reading this book, I’m rating it at four stars. ( )
1 vote CatherineB61 | May 31, 2023 |
I owe my discovery of the Canadian author Margaret Lawrence (1926-1987) to Joe from Rough Ghosts. Thanks to the miracle of Google Meet, we chat each week about books and so I didn't need to wait for Joe's review to order The Stone Angel, the book for which Laurence is best known.

This Side Jordan (1960) was her debut novel, and The Stone Angel is the first in the semi-autobiographical Manakawa Sequence. My 2016 edition includes an Introduction by Michael Schmidt which tells me that this classic of Canadian literature—
—divides readers in ways that serious literature, no matter how amusing and wry the writing, often does. Those seeking characters with whom they can identify, a sympathetic narrator, conventional uplift or tragedy, are going to be puzzled and disappointed by a book so apparently conventional, yet so determinedly offbeat. (p.vii)

For readers my age, it is only too easy to identify with a woman struggling with ageing. 90 year-old Hagar Currie Shipley is considerably older than me, but she faces the loss of her independence with anger about its indignities and her refusal to be 'put into' aged care is part of a future that too often crosses the mind. I am currently reading Brigid Delaney's Reasons Not to Worry, How to be Stoic in chaotic times ... and I wonder how stoic I will be when the time comes.

I think I will probably be a cantankerous old woman too.

As Schmidt points out in his Introduction, Hagar is actually two characters: the protagonist and the narrator. Neither of them are sympathetic. Hagar the protagonist is belligerent, defiant, judgemental and too often deliberately cruel. Her own worst enemy, she is a snob who married 'down' to thwart her father, and she maintains an internal monologue which is savage in its condemnations of others. But as memory usurps reality, her inhibitions weaken, and her hypercritical remarks no longer remain private. Her son Marvin and daughter-in-law Doris bear the brunt of this, but we only see the situation from Hagar's point-of-view. So Doris is a frump who wants to be rid of her, and she can count on Marvin to be too weak and indecisive to act. (Doris, of course, is the one who bears the burden of Hagar's frailty: getting up in the night, laundering the sheets, fending off the complaints about her cooking, dealing with the falls, taking her to the doctor and so on.)

Hagar the narrator could moderate this negative impression of the protagonist, but she takes her time about it. She interprets Hagar's memories provoked by events and by the cherished objects in her house, and slowly a back story emerges. It is through the narrator that we see Hagar's shame and her regrets, and late in the novel we learn about the horrific tragedy that she represses. It is through the narrator that we frame Hagar's self-analysis and recognise that it is her own behaviour that makes her life so joyless. She thinks that society judges her (or would, if they knew), the way that she judges it. Like a corset she can't take off, she can't be rid of the rigid conservatism and expectations that she learned from her widowed father and Aunt Doll who brought her up. So often we see her say that she could have said or done this or that, but doesn't. And the moment is lost.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/04/23/the-stone-angel-1964-by-margaret-laurence/ ( )
  anzlitlovers | Apr 22, 2023 |
I read this for my Zoom book club in September, and thought it was just wonderful. Laurence builds a fantastically nuanced portrait of a prickly, complex woman and her long life, all done through very close first-person narrative, which is not easy. Totally engrossing book, although please remind me not to buy any more used mass market paperbacks—such tiny print! I'm getting old. And speaking of which, this is definitely not a book I would have appreciated in my 20s and 30s. It's such a bittersweet portrait of a smart, disappointed, self-sabotaging but well-intentioned person, and I don't think I would have had the same compassion for her when I was younger (which is all on me, not the writer or the story). ( )
  lisapeet | Oct 3, 2022 |
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» Add other authors (7 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Laurence, Margaretprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Dijk, Edith vanTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
New, William H.Introductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage rage against the dying of the light. -Dylan Thomas
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Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand.
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The film adaptation of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, starring acclaimed actresses Ellen Burstyn and Ellen Page, and introducing Christine Horne, opens in theatres May 9, 2008. 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.

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"I've waited like this, for things to get better or worse, many and many a time.  I should be used to it.  So many years I waited...I didn't know what I was waiting for, except that I felt something else might happen - this couldn't be all."  In this beautifully crafted novel, first published in 1964, Margaret Laurence explores the life of one woman, the irascible, fiercely proud Hagar Shipley. Now over ninety and approaching death, she retreats from the bitter squabbling of her son and his wife to reflect on her past - her marriage to tough-talking Bram Shipley ('we'd each married for those qualities we later found we couldn't bear'), her two sons, her failures, and the failures of others. Her thoughts evoke not only the rich pattern of her past experience but also the meaning of what it is to grow old and come to terms with mortality.
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