Enraged and frightened, Hagar runs away to an old family property in the country where she spends a few cold, thirsty dank nights until found and hospitalized with a diagnosis of cancer and a short time to live. Doris herself is nearly seventy, and Marvin and Doris plan to place her in a nursing home. And yet it is the long-ignored Marvin that she shares her home with, along with his dowdy wife Doris, on whom the care burden falls as Hagar becomes more frail, dependent and confused. Her eldest son Marvin was invisible to her throughout his life her favourite son John died in a stupid driving prank. The marriage foundered: she was ashamed of her husband’s uncouthness and refused to ever reveal the pleasure that sex with him brought her. The only daughter of a rich merhant, she despised her widowed father’s pride in her achievements and emotional dependence on her, and deliberately married the sort of man she knew he disapproved of.

Hagar, the focal character of this book is raging all the way, just as she has throughout her long life.

GradeSaver, 16 February 2019 Web.I’m not a great epigraph reader, but the epigraph of this book seemed particularly apposite- Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Dylan Thomas). Next Section The Stone Angel Summary Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Osborne-Bartucca, Kristen. The film was not a great commercial success, but it still received a lot of positive critical attention. The Stone Angel was adapted into a film in 2007, directed by Kari Skogland. Margaret Atwood, also a notable contemporary Canadian novelist, writes of The Stone Angel: “Hagar’s sheer durability, the irreplaceable woman’s voice, the creative admixture of memory and imagination in a compelling first-person narrative-all these features, plus the fact that the novel turns up on more high school English courses in this country than any other homegrown work, ensure The Stone Angel a foundational place in the English Canadian literary canon.” The Stone Angel was also chosen as one of the books in the 2002 edition of Canada Reads. It is consistently ranked as one of the top Canadian novels of all time. The novel was Laurence’s first to be set in Canada, in the fictional town of Manawaka that features in many of her other novels. She decides to run away from home, and, left alone, she becomes immersed in reflections of the past, taking the reader through the story of her life and the many tumultuous events that have shaped her. Hagar is having difficulty coming to terms with her own death, and for that reason, she is desperately resisting her son's efforts to place her in a nursing home, as she perceives this as a symbol of her demise. The heroine of the novel is Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old woman who is endowed with a sharp mind and a proud, unyielding temper. The Stone Angel is a novel by Margaret Laurence first published in 1964.

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence