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The Making of a Writer begins at the end of Laurence's life, with the author dying of cancer, writing her memoirs then taking an overdose of pills January 5, 1987, to spare her children from having to care for her as she deteriorated. Laurence was predictably celebrated in the international press, identified by the obvious details: her Canadian Prairies upbringing in a strong Scots-Irish family; her unyielding desire to be a writer; her anti-war activism and generosity to fellow writers. Less obvious, perhaps, were her early years as a writer, travelling between Canada, England and particularly Africa, with her husband and two children; years of struggle in finding her own voice and that of her people.

What Xiques, an American writer and academic, proposes to present is a Margaret Laurence whose apprenticeship as a writer was not as North American as, say, the newspapers' elegies might suggest. She makes much - and rightly so - of Laurence's stay in Africa from 1950-1957. Since Xiques' biography stops short with the publication of Laurence's first novel, This Side Jordan (1960), the relation of the author of the translation A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954) to that of the Manawaka stories of the early sixties and seventies is not fully realized. Yet a landscape, like a language, serves to inform a writer.

The Prairies obviously meant much to Laurence, the "moss-hairy fallen logs and the white promise of wild strawberry blossoms…." But so, for a time, did Africa. Xiques speculates: "Perhaps looking at her father's copies of National Geographic had provided an impetus for her imagination. Composing childhood stories of voyages and adventures in faraway lands may somehow have become a part of Laurence's psyche, preparing the way for her later travels." The author concludes, "Who can say?" and we agree. The guesswork, here as elsewhere regarding motives and manners, seems pointlessly idle. The fact was Margaret "Peggy" Wemyss' husband, Jack Laurence, was a restless engineer who never felt comfortable in a job unless it was, it seemed, literally earth shaking. He found his greatest challenges in places distant from his native land.

In these places, and (based on the evidence Xiques provides) through her extensive, soul-sustaining correspondence with Canadian novelist Adele Wiseman, Laurence came to the realization that her own roots were in Canada rather than, say, Scotland - in a history "that has the most powerful hold over us in unsuspected ways, the names or tunes or trees that can recall a thousand images, and this almost-family history can be related only to one's first home." This is where the emotional rather than factual resonance between Laurence's life and her fiction gains ground. More significant than what happens to us can be how we feel about it afterward, or continue to react to it years later, and how events change us. Before coming to a fuller appreciation of Canada, Laurence's first real homes with her husband were in the British Somaliland Protectorate (now the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland) and the Gold Coast (now Ghana). It is further interesting to note the struggle of Canadian writers to be viewed as other than British or American, and to have their work accepted on its own terms, is only 60, 70 years old - a short time, really, as far as literary traditions run.

While many expatriate women around her embraced the life of the memsahib, Laurence (and her husband) abhorred it. Laurence railed against British colonialism in her life and work, considering herself "open-minded" to Africa and not at all condescending. Her view was an identifiably Canadian one (if not shared by all Canadians) and, what's more, post-colonial. Although they knew they would never be part of the people they visited, lived with or worked alongside, she and Jack had a desire to see and learn the lands they inhabited, whether together or apart.

Laurence carried this desire into her art. Xiques provides a fine example in "Mrs. Cathcart, In and Out of Purdah," an unpublished short story from the period included in the book's appendices. There would be many others. Of course, there is no denying Laurence found it exceedingly trying to fight the sense she may be writing her novels, stories and radio scripts in a kind of void. It took her a long time to hear back from editors to whom she submitted material. (Story's acceptance letter for "Uncertain Flowering" reached her a year and a half after it was sent.) On rough days, she could be as much at odds with her subject matter as with her responsibility to it. Laurence remained concerned about forging a literature based on where she was from even as she continued to write about where she lived. Wiseman offered some guidance on the matter; she advised her friend "to look to literature not simply as a by-product but as a prime value, as the expression of the quality of a society, as witness to the soul of a culture." Laurence's stories - about the struggle of Africa and Africans to free themselves from the burden of empire - were not unfamiliar. Both the past and present were available to her. The future would take care of itself if she did her job right.

Laurence came to believe as a writer that "a theme should be as simple as birth or death - something that can be summed up in a single sentence and yet whose ramifications are so wide that it can never be entirely said at all." In much the same way, Xiques' focus on Laurence's African years serves her biography well. Aside from the overuse of words like "however" and "nevertheless," her prose is rather straightforward, and her attempts to reveal her subject become more engaging when she lets us hear from Laurence directly, especially via her letters to Wiseman. In fact, the occasional correction of what Laurence remembers in her posthumously published memoirs, Dance on the Earth (1989), by what she recorded at the time of an event's unfolding in her letters is a useful reminder of the unavoidable subjectivity of all acts of recollection. Yet Xiques, despite the annoying and inconsistent technique of shifting from Peggy to Peg to Margaret in identifying Laurence at different stages in her life; despite extensive references and interviews; despite a narrative structure of recapitulation and repetition, writes with a palpable sense of distance. It is possible this lack of penetration has something to do with Laurence's habit of destroying her unpublished work. Laurence, who was neither as shy nor as stolid as many thought, apparently had a talent for obliterating parts of herself; those, it's easy to surmise, she wanted no one ever to see.

What we do see in Xiques' young Laurence is a writer seeking to understand her place in the world, regardless of the part of the world she inhabits, and her connection to others, regardless of class, age, sex, or race. Africa was where she not only wrote her first truly professional work, it was the setting of many of her stories. Laurence embraced the rhythms of the peoples and cultures she encountered. She was more than a traveller passing through, on tour with her busy husband. Laurence had what the author calls a "basic life-view that could say, even then, a man is never God, even in his own domain, and one should not mould the lives of others." This sentiment is one that was reinforced in Africa and surfaces in her collection The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963). We hear again and again, from friends and colleagues, how Laurence was always the type of person on whom nothing was lost and to whom questions about the world in which she lived came forcefully. In Genoa, she "noted the marble angels among the dark cypress trees. Her memory of that sight was to give her, fourteen years later, the paradoxical image that provided the title for her first major success as a novelist, The Stone Angel (1964)."

Laurence's lifelong theme, in Xiques' view, was "the significance of freedom and responsibility, both for individuals and for nations." But then much of Africa, to Laurence, recalled the beauty and harshness of the Prairies. In Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer, we see Laurence developing across these two landscapes - one immediate, the other remembered, and who could say which was which sometimes? - ripening in her concerns for and expressions of both. The British Somaliland Protectorate was Peggy's home for "a little less than two years [yet] the land and its people had a radical and lasting impact on her." A healthy curiosity and enthusiasm also must have helped to make it feel less like building bridges across oceans. Laurence was not only forging an identity for herself as a Canadian but as a Canadian writer, a battle still waged by many of our writers at home and abroad. She was developing fast, increasingly aware of what she should write and how. She did this by using the traditions, questions and conflicts of another place to discover, confront and interpret those of her own, creating fusions of African stories filtered through a nascent Canadian sensibility - at that stage in her career.

Upon her death, and after numerous moves, "more than one hundred books dealing with African material still remained in her personal library." The point Xiques tries to make is clear, but the emphasis seems wrong. It's not so surprising that reflections of Africa became less pronounced, the fusions, less overt, in Laurence's later writing. She would turn to more immediate issues once back home in Canada. What couldn't and wouldn't be diminished was her indebtedness. Of her sixteen published books, six deal with Africa, in part or in whole. No further proof of how Laurence's experience of the place caused her to grow more self-assured, about herself or her writing, need be found in books other than her own.