Laurence, Margaret (1926-1987), was a Canadian author. She is best known for her vivid and sympathetic portraits of women in her fiction. Such portraits appear in her five novels set in the fictional prairie town of Manawaka. The novels are The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), A Bird in the House (1970), and The Diviners (1974).
Laurence was born on July 18, 1926, in Neepawa, Manitoba. Her given and family name was Jean Margaret Wemyss. She was married to Jack Laurence from 1947 to 1969. From 1950 to 1957, Laurence traveled with her husband in Africa as he worked on engineering projects. She wrote a personal account of her experiences in what is now Somalia in The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963, reprinted as New Wind in a Dry Land). The novel This Side Jordan (1960) and the short-story collection The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963) describe Africa’s struggle to modernize. Laurence also wrote four children’s books and two collections of essays, Heart of a Stranger (1976) and Dance on the Earth: A Memoir (published in 1989). She died on Jan. 5, 1987.
