Mourning becomes Margaret: Laurence's farewell to fiction

Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) composed Dance on the Earth: A Memoir (1989) as a tribute to her mothers and a celebration of "the female principle in t he Holy Spirit." Laurence's copious holograph notes and drafts show that sh e used "Dance on the Earth" as the title of a novel she attempted to write before giving it to her memoir. While the draft novel parallels the memoir in more ways than its title, it resembles The Diviners even more closely. W hy was Laurence so determined to compose "Dance on the Earth" as a novel, a nd why was she unable to complete it? An answer to both questions may lie i n the censorship controversies of 1976 and 1985, when her Manawaka novels, especially The Diviners, were attacked as pornographic. When she was unable to complete her last novel, Laurence turned to the memoir form to convey h er legacy to her inheritors.