Laurence, Margaret 1926–

An award-winning Canadian novelist and short story writer, Ms. Laurence lived for a time in Africa and draws upon this experience for her fiction. A Jest of God, which is set in Canada, was filmed in 1968 as Rachel, Rachel. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)

Margaret Laurence has now produced an admirable body of work: the Somaliland travel book, a volume of short stories, and four novels; one set in Ghana, the others dealing with her gritty Manawakans. Now, themes are emerging, and private preoccupations. Some are trivial—gin bottles, and underwear, and the worry about the weight; others, like Iris Murdoch's twin-fantasies and magic-women, add immeasurably to the richness of her work: the basic grimness of the determined women, the conditioned righteousness, the pendulum-swing from righteousness to the arms of the dark, forbidden outsider.

Marian Engel, in...

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