Morag has a difficult relationship with her daughter Pique and her Métis lover Jules Tonnerre, and struggles to maintain her independence.

[1] Aritha Van Herk argues that when observing all of Laurence's work, it is evident that The Diviners explicitly connects the author's emotions, experiences, and professional development to the protagonist more than any of her other novels.

Morag wakes up one morning and finds a note from her daughter, Pique, explaining that she has left home to learn about her Metis heritage.

She reflects on her traumatic childhood, including the death of her parents who both died from polio, and her transition into a foster care household.

Christie's eccentric actions ignore social norms, and provides a platform for the novel's critique of socioeconomic class.

[4] Morag yearns to leave home, and enrolls in university, moving to Winnipeg where she initiates a relationship with an older professor, Brooke Skelton.

The latter saved Christie during World War I. Morag also takes inspiration from, and questions the depictions of femininity in, the work of female Canadian authors such as Catharine Parr Traill.

Carol – Teenage babysitter in Kitsilano, Vancouver Harold – broadcasters, reads the news, has an affair with Morag Chas J. Sampson – bookstore owner, “Agonistes Bookshop” in London, High Street.

Daniel McRaith – Highland Scotsman who meets Morag, has an affair with and later revealed to be a father of seven children with his wife Bridie.

Stacey Cameron Mavis Duncan Julie Kazlik Ross McVitie Mike Lobodiak Al Cates Steve Kowalski Jamie Halpern Eva Winkler – One of the few individuals from Manawaka that Morag likes speaking with, Winkler also takes care of Prin during her later days coping with obesity.

[6] According to Nora Stovel, Laurence uses three methods to dramatize Morag's creative development: "first, she employs a tripartite educational model of reading, critiquing, and writing.

Moreover, she includes mentors – Christie Logan, Miss Melrose, and Brooke Skelton – who teach Morag to read and write.

Aside from these autobiographical elements, Laurence also employs literary realism, which is evidenced by her "ostensibly objective third-person narrator".

[8] In The Diviners, Laurence eschews linearity, and the text shifts through time and space to produce the effect of simultaneity.

As a literary technique, simultaneity is characterized by the “concurrent presentation of elements from different places, multiple points-of-view, [and] radically disconnected segments of time".

[9] For instance, the opening section of The Diviners, titled River of Now and Then,suggests "two levels of narrative" and conveys the simultaneity of past and present.

Finally, critic Richard Lane brings in the issue of gender, and argues that the novel “foregrounds simultaneity as a major component of écriture féminine, the protagonist Morag Gunn and her Métis daughter shifting the focus of the cycle to class, ethnicity and history".

[8] As scholar Sumathy Swamy articulates, "Laurence's Manawaka novels The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), The Fire Dwellers (1969), and The Diviners (1974)...[have] given remarkable portraits of women fighting with their personal determination through self-assessment to find significant prototypes in their lives.

"[10] Swamy goes onto describe that Laurence's main character, Morag, "searches for her identity as a woman, mother and writer and as an individual in a community.

"[11] Race and Post-Colonialism Robert D. Chambers writes that "Morag dares to love across racial lines, and it may be this aspect, rather than anything else, which has made The Diviners so controversial within Canada.

Neil ten Kortenaar claims that The Diviners is a post-colonial novel, two possible reasons being that "it is a rejection of England and English literature in favour of a native tradition based on orality; and it is a celebration of creolization, the blending of different cultures in an indigenous mix.

By probing words' meanings, and by devices such as the use of 'memory bank movies' and photographs, Laurence includes an interrogation of language and of writing itself.

In this way, The Diviners participates in the critical examination of literature and language carries out in recent years by feminist literary theory.

[16] Repeated mentions of the "salty language" and questionable content have followed the novel since its publication in 1974 through to the current time period.

Yet, it is also praised for its acknowledgement of important social issue, including the after effects of colonialism, single motherhood, interracial relations, and the relationship between parent and child.