Book Review: THE STONE ANGEL by Margaret Laurence
Genre: Literary Fiction 
The Stone Angel
The book is the story of 90-year-old Hagar Shipley, told in flashbacks as she struggles with her declining abilities.
Hagar was born around 1875, the only daughter of a haughty and stern Scotsman, in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba. Her mother died in child-birth and her father spoiled her and taught her to be proud:
God might have created heaven and earth and the majority of people, but Father was a self-made man, as he himself had told us often enough.
Hagar learned pride well—too well—and pride is her downfall throughout her life. Pride prevents her from taking her father’s advice not to marry Brampton Shipley; pride thwarts her from love in her marriage; pride keeps her from finding joy in her sons. Ultimately, Hagar has lived a loveless, unhappy life largely due to her own haughtiness and resulting failure to recognize and communicate her feelings.
Although she has accumulated wisdom from her mistakes, she seems to stubbornly refuse to relate it to herself, while liberally applying it to others.
Stupid girl. She knows nothing. Why won’t she praise him a little she’s so sharp with him. He’ll become fed up in a minute. I long to warn her—watch out, watch out, you’ll lose him.
Well, the poor thing…Fancy spending your life worrying about what people were thinking. She must have had a rather weak character.
Once strong and self-sufficient, Hagar now depends on her son and his wife, both in their sixties, for care, projecting her self-loathing at her physical infirmities onto those who try to help her.
She can’t sit still an instant, that woman. She’s like a flea. I am under the impression that I myself am sitting quite composedly on this uncomfortable chair until Doris turns to me with a faintly puckered forehead. “Try and sit quietly, Mother. The more you fidget, the longer a time it seems.”
Laurence writes in an authentic voice, with brevity of words but deep insight. Sometimes the sentences are so brief that one can miss the breathtakingly precise understanding of life.
It doesn’t seem so very long ago.
Things never look the same from the outside as they do from the inside.
Nothing is ever changed at a single stroke, I know that full well, although a person sometimes wishes it could be otherwise.
As Hagar’s life draws to a close, she seems to finally admit her failings to herself and the regret and anguish she felt touched me deeply:
Every good joy I might had held, in my man or any child of mine or even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearances—oh, proper to whom? When did I ever speak the heart’s truth? Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.
Published in 1964, The Stone Angel has been on Canadian high school English curricula for decades and, despite its eloquence & power, has earned the derision of many students. I think this is because youth doesn’t identify with aging, with the regrets of life, or long-term consequences of things done when they are young.
I maintain that The Stone Angel
Link for my American readers:
I read this book for the first time in Grade 12 because it was required. But even then I loved it. The beauty of the writing surpassed anything else I had ever read. It remains one of my favourites.
An appreciation beyond your years, Suzanne! I like to think that I would have felt this way too, although this wasn’t on my curriculum. So much negative feedback out there from former students!
Sadly this was never required reading for me during my school years. I’ve recently read one book by Laurence (she wrote about early Nigerian literature) but want to read more. Glad to hear this one is so good!
Amy, after I reread this, I pulled all of the Laurence books (3) off my bookshelf and put them in my TBR pile. One is in the African series, of which I haven’t read any. I’m looking forward to reading them all. Thanks for dropping by!
It seems to me that you possess some insight of your own to value this account so highly. I have laughed and sobbed my way through The Stone Angel countless times, reading it first when my own mother, who was not an exact replica of Hagar Shipley but who shared some unfortunate traits, was aging and requiring more care from me, the only daughter near enough to provide family care. The Stone Angel should be required reading for everyone who has an aging parent- it can help us to learn compassion for such ones. The poor innocents who are critical now may have some occasions of ‘deja-vu’ in the future and will have no recollection of wherefrom its source. If only we can absorb the valuable lessons that this book reveals, we may avoid the Hagar Shipley syndrome, as our lives advance inexorably onward in one-directional time. It is looming closer for me- wish me well! E.
Elizabeth, I can only imagine the impact The Stone Angel must have had on you while you were caring for your aging mother. And, perhaps it was Laurence’s ultimate objective, to engender that compassion between generations, especially with those more elderly than we are.
I suspect that we cannot absorb all of the lessons in this book sufficiently to apply them as much as we would like in our own lives, but even in the attempt we must surely improve on what we otherwise do.
Thank you for your valuable perspective!
It’s so hard to think of aging parents as people who had a life without us. It’s just as hard to think of our own life from our parents’ point of view. I haven’t read this author at all but I think I’ll put this book on my wish list.
Barbara, I so agree, even though I try very hard to imagine older ones as children, young people, young parents, and so on….There is a comment near the end of Hagar’s story during a conversation with her grandson:
That’s what I am to him—a grandmother who gave him money for candy. What does he know of me? Not a blessed thing. I’m choked with it now, the incommunicable years, everything that happened and was spoken or not spoken. ..Someone really ought to know these things.
And while I know that I continue to think of my grown daughter as a very young woman, I can’t wrap my head around the thought that my parents think the same of me.
But at least we’re trying! I do think you would enjoy reading this.