The Stone Angel is a novel by Margaret Laurence first published in 1964. 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. 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. 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.
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. It is consistently ranked as one of the top Canadian novels of all time. The Stone Angel was also chosen as one of the books in the 2002 edition of Canada Reads. 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 adapted into a film in 2007, directed by Kari Skogland. The film was not a great commercial success, but it still received a lot of positive critical attention.
