Pilgrims’ Progress: Margaret Laurence and Hagar Shipley

All of Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka works, The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House and The Diviners, constitute a structure whose key-stone is Hagar Shipley, a tragic figure who is finally redeemed. In their different ways, Laurence’s heroines mirror their author’s sense of life as a gift and a pilgrimage. As Laurence has told Clara Thomas on various occasions, the one author whose themes and narrative techniques have profoundly affected her own is Joyce Cary. Sara Monday, Mr. Wilcher and Gulley Jimson, the narrators of Cary’s first trilogy, have strong links to her heroines. The differences arise from the English culture in which Cary’s characters move and speak in contrast to the Canadian world of Manawaka which Laurence creates with such authority.