Dec 26, 2009

The Stone Angel | Literary Qualities

When Laurence began her literary career, to describe oneself as a Canadian female writer from the Prairies was almost to apologize three times. The emergence of women's writing during the latter half of the twentieth century was different in Canada from the powerful polemics written in America or Britain; in Canada, the writers characteristically expressed themselves in fiction. The early novels of Margaret Laurence were not instantly highly esteemed by all critics, some of whom preferred the work of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Now it is those reviews that seem narrow-minded and...