The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays by Carol Shields, edited by Nora Foster Stovel

Twenty years after her passing, Carol Shields continues to draw the attention of readers. Her estate has recently emptied the cupboards with a release of Shields’s previously unpublished and/or uncollected stories and essays.

Specifically, The Canadian Shields includes two early stories and 49 essays. The essay form is generously represented; the collection includes travelogues, scholastic essays, introductions to books, memoir, speaking notes, nearly everything except grocery lists.

Shields was born the same year as Elvis (1935) in the suburb of Chicago that also produced Hemingway. In fact, Shields’s mother roomed with the Hemingways while Ernest was in Paris, lounging about, according to his father. A year later, he published The Sun Also Rises and became famous, but Shields’s mother had moved on by then.

Shields migrated to Canada with her husband in 1957, the same year that the Canada Council for the Arts was created, a fact repeated more than once in this book. Another fact repeated is that Shields didn’t read a Canadian novel until she had been in the country 10 years. About a decade after that, she studied Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa and wrote a thesis about Susanna Moodie, later published as a book.

After releasing poetry in the early 1970s, Shields became a novelist in 1976. Her oeuvre includes poetry, short stories, criticism, plays, and essays, but it is for her novels that she is best known. Her 1993 novel, The Stone Diaries, won the Governor General’s Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Her subject matter, generally, was the lives of ordinary women and critiques of patriarchy. The Canadian Shields hits these notes repeatedly, highlighting her first/second wave feminist bona fides. Shields is clear where she believes women have been left out or left silent. Who else has been left out or silenced she hasn’t much to say about.

Shields is clear where she believes women have been left out or left silent. Who else has been left out or silenced she hasn’t much to say about.



As an archival project, The Canadian Shields is richly rewarding. Shields had a powerful voice and a strong mind. She is forceful in her narratives and arguments. Whether those arguments speak to contemporary readers as they once did is more of an open question. The collection begins with a tribute to Shields by Margaret Atwood and concludes with one from Lorna Crozier. These hagiographic pieces burnish Shields’s memory but do nothing to contextualize Shields in the current moment.

Shields remains an icon of self-creation, a woman with a privileged beginning who achieved great heights during an era that discouraged women from doing so. She produced remarkable works and thought deeply about writing and craft. Her work, especially her short stories, could be aesthetically daring. A 2017 collection of her writings on writing, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing, is a more focused precursor to the book currently under review.

Shields’s writing took risks, while she remained socially reactionary. Those seeking radical insights here will be disappointed, but Shields’s powerful advocacy for the voices of women and close readings of female-authored texts (e.g., if anyone can make you want to take a second look at Moodie, it’s Shields) are as relevant as ever. The question of who gets to speak, though, must be broadened beyond Shields’s limited representations.

Shields’s writing took risks, while she remained socially reactionary. Those seeking radical insights here will be disappointed, but Shields’s powerful advocacy for the voices of women and close readings of female-authored texts (e.g., if anyone can make you want to take a second look at Moodie, it’s Shields) are as relevant as ever.

Carol Shields (1935–2003) was an American-born Canadian award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, and poet.

Nora Foster Stovel is Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta. She has published on Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Carol Shields, and Margaret Laurence, including Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete WritingsThe Collected Poetry of Carol Shields, and Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders

Publisher: University of Manitoba Press (September 9, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 336 pages
ISBN: 9781772840827

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.