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The Stone Angel Univ of Chicago Edition
Contributor(s): Laurence, Margaret (Author)

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ISBN: 0226469360     ISBN-13: 9780226469362
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
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Binding Type: Paperback - See All Available Formats & Editions
Published: June 1993
* Out of Print *

Annotation: With her life nearly behind her, the witty, irascible, and fiercely proud Hagar Shipley escapes from her nursing home and sets out in search of a way to reconcile herself to her tumultuous past. Through her reflections, we come to know the rebellious young bride in a remote prairie town, her love for her two sons, the freedom she claimed, and the joys she denied herself. In this bold, final step toward freedom and independence, Hagar gains a deeper understanding of the meaning of acceptance. Her thoughts evoke not only the rich pattern of her past experience but also the meaning of what it is to grow old and to come to terms with mortality.

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Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction
Dewey: FIC
LCCN: 93016184
Series: Phoenix Fiction
Physical Information: 0.9" H x 5.3" W x 7.98" L (0.83 lbs) 318 pages
Accelerated Reader Info
Quiz #: 8121
Reading Level: 4.8   Interest Level: Upper Grades   Point Value: 13.0
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
The Stone Angel, The Diviners, and A Bird in the House are three of the five books in Margaret Laurence's renowned Manawaka series, named for the small Canadian prairie town in which they take place. Each of these books is narrated by a strong woman growing up in the town and struggling with physical and emotional isolation.

In The Stone Angel, Hagar Shipley, age ninety, tells the story of her life, and in doing so tries to come to terms with how the very qualities which sustained her have deprived her of joy. Mingling past and present, she maintains pride in the face of senility, while recalling the life she led as a rebellious young bride, and later as a grieving mother. Laurence gives us in Hagar a woman who is funny, infuriating, and heartbreakingly poignant.

This is a revelation, not impersonation. The effect of such skilled use of language is to lead the reader towards the self-recognition that Hagar misses.--Robertson Davies, New York Times

It is Laurence's] admirable achievement to strike, with an equally sure touch, the peculiar note and the universal; she gives us a portrait of a remarkable character and at the same time the picture of old age itself, with the pain, the weariness, the terror, the impotent angers and physical mishaps, the realization that others are waiting and wishing for an end.--Honor Tracy, The New Republic

Miss Laurence is the best fiction writer in the Dominion and one of the best in the hemisphere.--Atlantic

Laurence] demonstrates in The Stone Angel that she has a true novelist's gift for catching a character in mid-passion and life at full flood. . . . As Hagar Shipley] daydreams and chatters and lurches through the novel, she traces one of the most convincing--and the most touching--portraits of an unregenerate sinner declining into senility since Sara Monday went to her reward in Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth.--Time

Laurence's triumph is in her evocation of Hagar at ninety. . . . We sympathize with her in her resistance to being moved to a nursing home, in her preposterous flight, in her impatience in the hospital. Battered, depleted, suffering, she rages with her last breath against the dying of the light. The Stone Angel is a fine novel, admirably written and sustained by unfailing insight.--Granville Hicks, Saturday Review

The Stone Angel is a good book because Mrs. Laurence avoids sentimentality and condescension; Hagar Shipley is still passionately involved in the puzzle of her own nature. . . . Laurence's imaginative tact is strikingly at work, for surely this is what it feels like to be old.--Paul Pickrel, Harper's

 
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