Canadian Writers Abroad

The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays by Carol Shields, Edited by Nora Foster Stovel. University of Manitoba Press, 2024, 337 pages.
Reviewed by Merilyn Simonds

The last time I saw Carol Shields was three years before her death, at the famous Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, where we were both appearing. My husband Wayne and I had lunch with Carol and Don and we laughed about the odd payment we’d each received for our on-stage services: a case of fairly good champagne. Wayne and I were about to drive north through the countryside on a mini-tour for my book of stories, The Lion in the Room Next Door, and planned to leave a trail of bottles in our wake. Carol and Don were trying to figure out how to get a crate of champagne onto the plane home.

Carol saw such quotidian dilemmas as comic and at the same time deeply revelatory. It was the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice versa that captured her attention, which made some critics view her work as not only light-hearted, but too light to merit serious attention. She proved them wrong, going on to win the Governor General’s award, the Orange Prize, and the Pulitzer (she held dual citizenship in Canada and the United States, where she was born).

In a tribute to Carol Shields written by Margaret Atwood for the Virginia Quarterly Review — and reprinted as a Forward to The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays by Carol Shields — Atwood describes reading Shields’s novel, The Box Garden, in the 1970s and again thirty years later, with wildly different responses. Her younger self laughed out loud at Shields’s portrait of a “mother with scant taste but a lot of energy, who spends her time like a down-market and rather crazed Martha Stewart, relentlessly decorating her modest house.” Decades later, “with several demented decorating episodes of my own behind me, I find it poignant, even faintly tragic…” Atwood continues:

“This ability to strike two such different chords at once is not only high art, it’s also the essence of Carol Shields’s writing — the iridescent, often hilarious surfaces of things, but also their ominous depths. The shimmering pleasure boat, all sails set, skimming giddily across the River Styx.”

The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays by Carol Shields, edited by Nora Foster Stovel and published by the University of Manitoba, where Shields taught for a time, is a gathering of fifty short writings, including three previously unpublished stories and two dozen previously unpublished essays, as well as two dozen essays previously published in magazines and journals but never before collected. They represent several years of culling by Stovel from more than two hundred boxes of Shields’s archives at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.

There are some real insights here, small portals opened into this writer’s creative process and principles, some of which we have already read in Startle and Illuminate, the collection of Shields’s writings on writing assembled by her novelist daughter Anne Giardini. “Learning to read was like falling into a mystery deeper than the mystery of airwaves or the halo around the head of the baby Jesus.” In another piece, Shields reveals how as a writer she scavenges physical details from real life, like the woman she met in passing who was buying candles to match her new nightgown. “We don’t quite know what we’re writing about, what we’re putting in, and what we’re leaving out.”

A reader can learn a lot in these pages, too, about women writers who have been forgotten and about what it was like to be writing novels when almost no novels by Canadians were being published and when women were expected to write about the perfect baked potato and how to edge a knitted top with shell crochet. As Shields observed about the future of fiction in an undated talk she gave to an unspecified audience, “It was a close call. The Patient nearly died.” She comes down hard on Tom Wolfe, who came down hard on Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and cheers to see Shirley Jackson in The New Yorker, and Jane Smiley and Mona Simpson breathing life into the family saga, and Alice Munro busily deepening the channel of realism.

Each of the pieces in this book is interesting in its own way, perhaps most as a mirror held up to Carol Shields the woman, as differentiated from Carol Shields the writer. There is much interesting detail about the books she read, how she wrote, her publishing trajectory. But many of the pieces are clearly early drafts, somewhat clumsy working-outs of ideas. Her faithful readers know she is better than this. 

Academics will undoubtedly find value in this compilation of unpublished pieces. Readers, too, may delight in this peek into the archives of a prominent and much-loved Canadian writer. But as I writer, I admit I felt queasy moving through these pages. Fictional vignettes and first drafts are how a writer traps bits of reality and/or imagination that will eventually find a place — or not — in a finished, polished writing project. As for the speeches and talks, many writers understandably reserve the right to edit such pieces for the page rather than the stage, two entirely different forms of writing.

I didn’t know Carol Shields well, but she always seemed to me a modest, very private, and deeply personal writer. I can’t help but wonder what she would think to see her out-takes in print. As for me, I am rushing to put a caveat on my own archives: For Research Purposes Only.   

---

Carol Shields lived abroad at the beginning of her career. While studying at Exeter University, she met her future husband. From September 1960 until November 1963, the Shields lived in Manchester, England. In 1962, Carol sold a short story to a British magazine, The Storyteller, and another to the BBC (“For Business Reasons” was broadcast in March of that year). They also had year-long sojourns in rural France, Paris, California, and London, England.

---

Merilyn Simonds is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book, Walking with Beth: Conversations with my 100-Year-Old Friend, will be published by Random House Canada in September, 2025. She divides her time equally between Canada and the mountains of Mexico. 

---

• Nora Foster Stovel also edited The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields, Montreal; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.
• Carol Shields, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing, Penguin Random House Canada, 2017.
• Carol Shields Fonds
• Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995 for The Stone Diaries, as well as the Governor General’s award.
• Larry’s Party won the Orange Prize in 1998.
• The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
• This fan site has lots of pictures of Carol Shields: The Carol Shields Literary Trust.
• Simonds’ book, The Lion in the Room Next Door, McClelland and Stewart 1999, was reviewed by Lynne Van Luven in The Quill and Quire. 
• The website of Merilyn Simonds, and Simonds on Reading Abroad for Canadian Writers Abroad.

Header photo of Tintern Abbey in Wales by Debra Martens.