The Stone Angel

Margaret Laurence

I recently finished Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, which quite a number of you have raved about, the most vocal being the Rev. :-) It took me this long to pick it up but it was worth it. It's essentially the story of an old woman who is recounting her life and it's juxtaposed with the events that happening to her in the present. This woman, Hagar Shipley, is cantankerous, suspicious, mean, and it's difficult to like her. But somehow, along the way, her story began to pull me in, and I vacillated between being annoyed with her, empathizing with her situation, and fearing that I would end up just like her! The story is a perfectly ordinary one, not filled with heroics or tragedy or romance. It's the exploration of Shipley's character that makes up the most of the story, and I think that, in a way, it holds up a mirror into the future for the average person. Perhaps that's what made me read this right through the end.