The Stone Angel

Ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, proud, unbending and afraid, looks back over her hard life on the Manitoba prairie as she flees her son's house rather than be put in a home. Laurence's Manawaka, drawn from the real prairie town of Neepawa, anchors the memory: the Currie store and the blind marble angel in the cemetery, the Shipley farm of her rough marriage, and the west-coast city where her old age plays out its last defiant days.

Hagar

Manawaka

The Currie store

In the prairie town of Manawaka, Hagar grows up the proud daughter of the storekeeper Jason Currie, taught to prize respectability above all warmth. Laurence builds the whole moral world of the Scots-Presbyterian prairie here, the gentility and the hardness that will shape, and cripple, Hagar's long life.

The early memories

inspired by Manawaka is Laurence's fictional prairie town, drawn from her own Neepawa, Manitoba; it is sited at that real town on the Manitoba plain.

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