A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [90]
Rachel Cameron begins as a child, still stuck in the time of the little girls’ skipping chant she hears through her open classroom window, still playing dutiful daughter to a mother who treats her as if she is only half grown. At the age of thirty-four, she arrives at gawky adolescence, agonizing over her appearance and sexuality, going through a painful and unrequited crush. But she ends as an adult, having realized the childishness of her own mother and thus her inability to offer emotional safety, having accepted the risks inherent in being alive, having taken her true place in time: “Beside me sleeps my elderly child…. What will happen? What will happen. It may be that my children will always be temporary, never to be held. But so are everyone’s.”
Re-reading A Jest of God yet again, I was cheered by how little it has dated. Some of the social customs and sexual constraints may have vanished, but the kinds of expectations placed on women, although in different costume, are still around – perfect physical beauty, total self-confidence, angelic and selfless nurturing of one variety or another. What Rachel can offer us now as readers is something we still need to know: how to acknowledge our own human and necessary limitations, our own foolishness. How to say both No, and Yes.
BY MARGARET LAURENCE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963)
Dance on the Earth (1989)
ESSAYS
Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists
and Novelists 1952–1966 (1968)
Heart of a Stranger (1976)
FICTION
This Side Jordan (1960)
The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)
The Stone Angel (1964)
A Jest of God (1966)
The Fire-Dwellers (1969)
A Bird in the House (1970)
The Diviners (1974)
FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jason’s Quest (1970)
Six Darn Cows (1979)
The Olden Days Coat (1979)
The Christmas Birthday Story (1980)
LETTERS
Margaret Laurence – Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters [ed. John Lennox] (1993)
Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman [ed. John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky] (1997)
TRANSLATIONS
A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954)
This book was first published by McClelland & Stewart in 1966.
Copyright © 1966, 1974 by Margaret Laurence
Afterword copyright © 1988 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
New Canadian Library edition 1988
This New Canadian Library edition 2009
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987
A jest of God / Margaret Laurence ; with an afterword by Margaret Atwood.
(New Canadian library)
eISBN: 978-1-55199-376-8
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8523.A86J4 2009 C813′.54 C2008-906072-5
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The lines from “Losers” from Smoke and Steel by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1920 by Harcourt Brace & World Inc., renewed 1948 by Carl Sandburg, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & World Inc.; the lines from “Harp Song of the Dane Women” from Puck of Pooks Hill by Rudyard Kipling reprinted by permission of Mrs. George Bambridge and the Macmillan Company of Canada Limited.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/NCL
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Table of Contents
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About the Author