Margaret Laurence is a major Canadian novelist who has created her Manawaka
world with gigantic complexity, reaching out from her own place and time
through four generations of men and women in Canadian western town.
Neepawa has, indeed, a great impact on Laurence’s writings. Laurence says that Neepawa
and its Scots-Presbyterian pioneers, not Scotland, represent her real past. “My true roots
were here” (Laurence, 1976). Neepawa, no doubt, supplied ‘elements’ of Manawaka but
this town of her imagination, her own private worlds, is “not so much any one prairie town
as an amalgam of many prairie towns.”
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