Margaret Laurence

Margaret Laurence had a painful childhood marked by loss. Her mother died when she was four, and her father when she was nine. She spent the rest of her childhood living with her stepmother and brother in her maternal grandfather’s home, and in the mid-1940s, left her hometown to attend Winnipeg’s United College. She published poems, stories, and essays throughout her collegiate career and edited the student literary journal. After graduation, she worked at a local independent newspaper until her marriage, at which point her husband’s engineering job took them overseas to England and Africa. She began a literary career in the 1960s, and soon thereafter separated from her husband. Newly independent and flourishing as a writer, Laurence traveled around Canada and held positions at the University of Toronto and Trent University. A deeply literary and left-leaning writer, Laurence’s works engaged the ethical failures of colonialism, the pain of loss, the indignity of aging, and the difficulty of domestic love—and were frequently set in a fictional town of her own making, Manawaka. The Stone Angel and The Diviners are loosely-related novels whose characters briefly overlap—both books are frequently cited as classics of Canadian literature, and yet are often banned from school curriculums. Laurence, having received a metastatic cancer diagnosis in 1986, committed suicide at her home in 1987, and was buried in her hometown of Neepawa. Her legacy and contribution to Canadian literature have been widely celebrated throughout the country, and several university buildings and lecture series have been named in her honor.