Description
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. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. From AudioFile This arresting story, with its powerful opening, is beautifully read by a talented cast, sensitively led by Janet Wright as the heroine. At the end of her long life, Hagar Shipley looks back at the choices she made in her battle for personal independence. The cast's fine interpretation of each character pulls the listener into a Canadian family saga both intriguing and disturbing. The sightless stone angel, which overlooks the Canadian town and graces the production's CD jacket, serves as an apt metaphor for a melancholy story. Listeners may question some of Hagar's decisions and the prices she pays for them but will savor this poignant listening experience. L.C. 2005 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) is one of Canada's finest writers and is the author of five novels She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1972 and she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1977. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. The Stone Angel is a compelling journey seen through the eyes of a woman nearing the end of her life. At ninety, Hagar Shipley speaks movingly of the perils of growing old and reflects with bitterness, humor, and a painful awareness of her own frailties on the life she has led. From her childhood as the daughter of a respected merchant, to her rebellious marriage, Hagar has fought a long and sometimes misguided battle for independence and respect. In the course of examining and trying to understand the shape her life has taken, her divided feelings about her husband, her passionate attachment to one son and her neglect of another, she is sometimes regretful, but rarely penitent. Asking forgiveness from neither God nor those around her, she must still wrestle with her own nature: "Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear." She has been afraid of being unrespectable, afraid of needing too much, afraid of giving too much, and her pride is both disturbing and inspiring. The Stone Angel is an excellent example of the realism and compassion present in all of Margaret Laurence's writing. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14 . -- From 500 Great Books by Women ; review by Sonja Larsen --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more
Features & Highlights
- 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
