Carol Shields, June 2, 1935 - July 16, 2003

Upon the news of Carol Shields’ passing at age 68 from complications of breast cancer, the literary world mourns her loss yet celebrates the talent of a vibrant and much-loved author. 

Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935, Carol Shields studied at Hanover College, the University of Exeter in England, and received an MA from the University of Ottawa.  At age 22, she married Donald Hugh Shields and moved to Canada where she remained for the rest of her life.  She was the mother of five children and the grandmother of eleven grandchildren.  Shields had been a Professor at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba. 

In 1998, she was diagnosed with Stage-3 breast cancer but, as her publishers note, “Despite being seriously ill, Carol remained joyous, creative and graceful, a generous friend to countless men and women around the world, a loving and beloved wife to Don, her husband of 46 years, and an attentive mother and grandmother.”  In 2000, she and her husband Don moved from Winnipeg to Victoria where she lived until her passing. 

Shields is best known for her best-selling and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Stone Diaries (1993).  The Stone Diaries also won Canada's Governor General’s Award for Fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the Booker Prize.  Additionally, it was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly and a Notable Book by The New York Times Book Review.  Her 1997 novel Larry’s Party won the UK’s coveted Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction. Additionally, Shields was awarded a Canadian Authors Association Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the National Critics' Circle Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  She was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (the world's richest literary prize for a single work of fiction), short-listed for the Booker Prize twice and was a Companion to the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Manitoba.

     In addition to The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party, Shields has written numerous other novels and short-story collections, including: Small Ceremonies (1976); The Box Garden (1977); Happenstance (1980); A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982); Various Miracles (1985); Swann (1987); The Orange Fish (1989); The Republic of Love (1992); and Dressing Up for the Carnival (2001).  Shields has published several collections of poetry including Others (1972), Intersect (1974), and Coming to Canada (1992) as well as the plays Departures and Arrivals (1988) and Thirteen Hands (1993).  A book of criticism, Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision was published in 1977.

In 2002, Shields published her final novel, Unless, which achieved both critical acclaim and popular success.  It was nominated for many literary prizes including the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been a fixture on the bestseller lists since its publication. 

Shields’ success is undoubtedly linked with what broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel has called Shields’ “particular kind of humanity.” Wachtel notes that Shields’ humanity is “the foundation of her commitment to writing as a form of redemption. Redeeming the lives of lost or vanished women.”  Shields began writing “the kind of book I wanted to read but couldn’t find”— books which examined women’s friendships and women’s inner lives.  All of her novels explore the importance of the quotidian, the urgency of relationships and the intersections between individuals and their communities.

As reviewer Bill Robinson notes of Unless, it “raises ‘the quotidian,’ to its rightful place, where the everyday is a constant source of beauty and enlightenment.” For all the above reasons, it is not surprising that Unless made the top 10 list of Britain's best-loved books written by women.

Another writer in that top 10 list was Jane Austen, whose novels occupy three of the top 10 spots.  Austen was a writer with whom Shields was deeply interested.  In 2001 Shields wrote a writerly biography of Jane Austen for which she was given the $25,000 Charles Taylor prize for literary non-fiction in April 2002.

Shields’ intrigue with the daily lives of everyday people is also evident in the two best-selling Dropped Threads anthologies, which she co-edited with Marjorie Anderson.  In these collections, women write candidly about the things women experience but do not feel able to talk about. In an interview about Dropped Threads, Shields noted, “Our feeling was that women are so busy protecting themselves and other people that they still feel they have to keep quiet about some subjects.” 

As The New York Times Book Review wrote of Carol Shields’ best-known novel, “The Stone Diaries reminds us again why literature matters.” Indeed, in all of Shields’ writings, we are not only reminded of why literature matters but also why individuals and their the day to day lives matter.  Shields’ novels, short stories, plays and poems get to the heart of her characters’ inner lives, showing how places, people and relationships make us who we are.

Carol Shields was a much-loved presence in the Canadian literary world and though she will be deeply missed, her “particular kind of humanity” will live on in her works and in the hearts of her readers. 

Heidi LM Jacobs
August 1997

Updated July 17, 2003