It is important to remember that what Laurence complains of, in her interview with Graeme Gibson, partner of Margaret Atwood, was absolutely true, that “some of my work, particularly The Fire-Dwellers, received some real put-downs from a number of male reviewers. They didn’t even say it was a bad novel, it was just that, if anybody like Stacey existed, they just would rather not know” (p. 350, note 21). For example, one of my professors of Education at McArthur College, Queen’s University, demanded to know if I had read some new novel “about fire.” When I admitted that I had, he asked me what “was in it”, because his otherwise contented, albeit house-bound wife, was “totally different” after reading it. Female academics like Helen Buss defended her as their topic of research, when (all-male) examiners opined that work on D.H. Lawrence was legitimate, while the sound-alike Margaret Laurence (who?) a pretender, was “nothing but a housewife”. So little-regarded too were (female) part-time graduate students, ably balancing class work with home and family, relegated to those who had no chance at “serious” tenure-track careers. Thus, the ascent of the Independent Scholar was birthed.
Foster Stovel not only serves up a credible examination of Laurence’s oeuvre, in relation to the contexts of Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman, she also manages to punctuate the text with allusions to recent female theorists of autobiography, as well as comments on characters like “Rachel and Stacey [who] do not engage in specifically feminist activity...they do exhibit a budding feminist consciousness that is easy to overlook when a 1990s reader focuses on their enmeshment in patriarchal domestic arrangements and mindsets” (p. 349-50, note 20.)
Much has been made of “Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel” held at the University of Calgary in 1982, which I attended. It is true that Laurence “topped List A”, heading the best 100 books and she book-ended List B, framing the top ten Canadian novels, with The Stone Angel as number one and The Diviners as number ten.” (p. 342, note 1). It needs to be mentioned that this may have had as much to do with their paperback publication in McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library Series (edited by Malcolm Ross) as it did with their intrinsic merit, a possibility Margaret Laurence vociferously pointed out at the time. Foster Stovel offers a fresh evaluation of Laurence’s books for children which may have been dismissed for lack of serious critical attention. She considers Laurence’s journalistic and semi-journalistic essays, in newspaper, magazine, and academic publications. There is an extensive list of “Works Cited”, from which passages are paraphrased in the body of the text, and citations of these sources appear in the substantial end notes.
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Foster Stovel states she had access to the Laurence estate containing unpublished material, including an unfinished novel “Dance on the Earth” (not to be confused with her memoir of the same title) and final journal. She examined the Laurence manuscripts at McMaster University (holograph notes and drafts for the unfinished novel were not available until 1997, when they formed an accession of material in the Margaret Laurence Fonds, of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, at McMaster University’s Mills Memorial Library); and her correspondence and papers, containing notes, typescripts of novels, and requests for revisions, at York University. (I recall asking a York University archivist for permission to consult the newly-acquired collection some years earlier and receiving a curt response to the effect there was a twenty-five caveat.) Furthermore, this critic reviewed issues of Annals of the Black and Gold (stored in the Margaret Laurence Home in Neepawa) in which Laurence published poems and stories. Other juvenilia were contained in Vox, (for which Laurence served as assistant editor) at the University of Winnipeg and the Manitoban archived in the University of Manitoba Library. Foster Stovel cites the original introduction to Long Drums and Cannons (which was not published in the 1968 edition but is quoted by Foster Stovel in her introduction to the 2001 edition.) She cites the occasions when Laurence was inspired to compose the African stories, including one not included in standard Laurence bibliographies and which has not been discussed by critics, in spite of its significance. She refers to recollections by a former mayor of Neepawa-and-a- contemporary of Margaret Laurence and by another source who remarked that Laurence displayed talent in high-school English class. As such, Foster Stovel builds on the existing critical infrastructure of biographies by James King, Donez Xiques, and Lyall Powers, as well as editions of Laurence’s letters by John Lennox, Ruth Panofsky, Paul Socken, and J.A. Wainwright.
This critic is correct in that Laurence “predicted that The Diviners, the final of her five Manawaka novels, would be her last.” (p. 265) However, Laurence made these predictions about other junctures in her career, much to the dismay of post-graduate students whose theses and dissertations took these predictions to be fact. In this instance, she was prescient Though the novel was intended to wind up all the threads of the Manawaka cycle, who is to say it would have been “Laurence’s grand finale, her farewell to fiction[?]” (p. 269) That she intended the unfinished novel to be the finale of the Manawaka cycle is clear; what is not is why she was incapable of completing it, leaving this issue to conjecture by scholars. Foster Stovel weighs in, by advancing the theory, based on Laurence’s notes and letters, it was too painful and too personal, not removed geographically and temporally from her life, from which she was seeking refuge. Yet, Laurence retained hope that she was merely putting aside the project “temporarily” to work on her memoirs and “let it [the novel] simmer on the back burner.” (p. 281) It could be an interesting experiment if some writer can be found to finish this novel (as Jane Austen enthusiasts have done) and/or to complete a sequel, like Gone With the Wind, Mitchell’s classic novel.
What I would like to add is, that while Laurence “mastered” (not gender-neutral) the full extent of mother-daughter relationships, at least in fiction, what escaped and ultimately silenced her was her attempt at a novel which Foster Stovel says “would have highlighted that maternal-filial relationship even more centrally.” (p. 273) Instead, Laurence celebrated the matrilineal legacy in her memoir of the same name, “Dance on the Earth.” Foster Stovel muses, “Perhaps she was unable to get inside the heads of people as closed-minded as [Minister] Jake Flood (or Sam Buick).” (p. 281) Laurence had written male characters into her novels at a time when it was widely accepted that, while male authors could concoct brilliant female characters which we should accept without questioning, female authors, if they wrote anything other than “bosom-ripping” romances, were incapable of writing genuinely authentic male characters. Was this a factor in the delay, mitigated by health issues, the death of her brother from pancreatic cancer, her own depression? I have a difficult time reading about her life reduced to “addictions, alcohol and nicotine.” One of the themes which reverberated for me was her profound sense of patriarchy, by which it felt as if your father, if he could, would kill you. Here we find the male principle, incarnated as overbearing grandfather; the undependable, intermittent lover; the person of authority; whether that was a paternalistic publisher, an English Professor who finds you wanting or a husband who is indifferent to his wife’s career aspirations, to the extent it necessitated divorce (in order for her brilliance to shine) and her endurance of precarious economic challenges.
Laurence regarded all her books as “gifts of grace”. As Foster Stovel points out, Laurence explains, in her memoir, “I’ve never been able to force a novel. I have always had the sense of something being given to me. You can’t...force into being something that isn’t there.” Rather, she left behind notes about the Holy Spirit which was, in her opinion, at least partially, female. When she tried to write in the name of the Father and the Son, what she successfully produced was written in the name of the Holy Female.