Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

Morley, who has written extensively on Margaret Laurence, has updated
her 1981 literary biography of the author with a longer selected
bibliography and an epilogue dealing with the 13 or so years between
Laurence’s last adult fiction in 1974 and her death in 1987.

After two prefaces and a “Chronology” of Laurence’s life and
work, Morley deals briefly with the life up to 1981 and with
Laurence’s five books about Africa, showing how her experiences and
travels prepared her for the five novels set in Canada. Her aversion to
imperialism, seen first-hand in Africa and related to the Canadian
consciousness and to the treatment of the Métis, becomes an important
theme in her later fiction. The travels are used both as actuality and
as a metaphor for life—a journey from restriction to inner or
spiritual freedom.

The second chapter, which deals with the African years, conveys
Laurence’s growing interest in the psychology of colonialism and how
this shows up in the work, not as political comment, but in the strength
of characterization. Throughout, she deals with, among other things,
themes, imagery, and structure in the light of the author’s life and
of other writings (letters, reviews, criticism) of the time.

In treating the Canadian novels, Morley handles the same issues, but in
somewhat greater depth, paying particular attention to recurring
patterns and motifs in the works. Here, she also discusses the
controversy over whether The Diviners should be taught in some Canadian
high schools, and the devastating effect of the debacle on the author.
The epilogue conveys the strain and stress of the controversy, which
emerged again in 1984–85, suggesting that it contributed to
Laurence’s excessive smoking and her indulgence in alcohol and
possibly to her early death. Morley gives the reader a sense of
Laurence’s deep humanity, her sensitivity as an artist and a woman,
and the formidable pressures of her many activities—among them,
attending conferences, participating in writers’ workshops, writing
book reviews, reading manuscripts, and personally replying to readers’
letters, as well as participation in several anti-pollution
organizations and in peace work. She also conjectures about possible
reasons why Laurence discontinued writing adult fiction after The
Diviners.

There are some minor problems with Margaret Laurence, among them the
many typos (particularly in the epilogue); the references, in the
opening biographical section, to Laurence in the present tense, which
might lead an uninformed reader (particularly a high-school student) to
assume that she was still alive; and the switch, for some unexplained
reason, from referring to Laurence by her surname throughout most of the
book, to calling her “Margaret” in the epilogue, suggesting a
greater intimacy with the author after her death. As well, the chapters
dealing with the works spend a great deal of time retelling the stories.
But such issues aside, this is a valuable contribution to Laurence
scholarship, one that should lead the way for further analysis and
interpretation of her life and work.