"The main concern of a writer remains that of somehow creating the individual on the printed page, of catching the tones and accents of human speech, of setting down the conflicts of people who are as real to him as himself," Margaret Laurence has written in Long Drums and Cannons (1968). "If he does this well, and as truthfully as he can, his writing may sometimes reach out beyond any national boundary." Though referring to the Nigerian plays and novels of the 1950s and 1960s, Laurence's comments also explain the pattern and the significance of her own fiction. In her early fiction with its African settings and in her later fiction with its Canadian settings she creates the "individual on the printed page" with a force and clarity almost unparalleled in Canadian literature. The truth of her portraits, the realism of their backgrounds, and the humanity and wisdom of...