Table of Contents

Introduction (David Staines) 1

The Spirit and the Letter: The Correspondence of Margaret Laurence (John Lennox) 7

Cavewomen Div(in)ing for Pearls: Margaret Laurence and Marian Engel (Christl Verduyn) 23

Reading Margaret Laurence's Life Writing: Toward a Postcolonial Feminist Subjectivity for a White Female Critic (Helen M. Buss) 39

Margaret Laurence and the City (W.H. New) 59

The Figure of Unknown Soldier: Home and War in The Fire-Dwellers (Birk Sproxton) 79

(W)Rites of Passage: The Typescript of The Diviners as Shadow Text (Nora Foster Stovel) 101

Listening: Laurence's Women (Kristjana Gunnars) 121

Sitting Down to Write: A Discourse of Morning (Robert Kroetsch) 129

Margaret Laurence: The Shape of a Writer's Shadow (Aritha van Herk) 135

To Find Refreshment in Writing Children's Books: A Note on Margaret Laurence's Writing for Children (Janet Lunn) 145

Faith and the Vocation of the Author (Lois Wilson) 151

Margaret Laurence: A Reminiscence (Joyce Marshall) 163

Contributors 169

About the Author

Professeur titulaire d'anglais l'Universite d'Ottawa, David Staines est l'auteur d'une vingtaine d'ouvrages, dont The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture (1977), Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century's End (1995), The Worlds of Carol Shields (2014) et The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro (2016)