Abstract
The celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields (1935–2003) is most famous for her ten novels, and justly so, but admirers of her fiction may not be aware that she was also a poet, playwright, biographer, editor, critic, and essayist. Not only did this protean writer compose poems, plays, stories, novels, and biographies, but she also wrote numerous essays, a genre traditionally dominated by male authors, including those in Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing (2016).
Shields’s essays reveal her iconoclastic, rebellious approach to conventional narrative traditions and her playful, subversive experimentation with her innovative fiction as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. She progresses from viewing the novel as a “boxed kit” to desiring to “blurt bravely,” especially regarding women’s experiences. Her essays also reveal her metafictional impulse, showcasing her writing about writing, as she celebrates writing as performance, offering advice to aspiring writers.
In Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders fourteen scholars explore her fiction, both short stories and novels, through the lens of her nonfiction, demonstrating how her essays illuminate her revisionist policies and elucidate the development of her subversively feminist fiction, inspiring us to read it with new eyes.
Following a Preface by Anne Giardini, an Introduction to the collection by Nora Foster Stovel, and a Prologue on the essay genre by Christl Verduyn, critics Neil Besner, Marta Dvořák, Coral Anne Howells, and Nora Foster Stovel examine Shields’s short stories published in three collections—Various Miracles (1985), The Orange Fish (1989), and Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000)—as each critic applies the principles expressed in Shields’s essays to illumine her short fiction.
Shields often emphasizes in her essays how her experimentation with short stories, especially Various Miracles, revolutionized her subsequent novels—beginning with Swann (1987), continuing with The Stone Diaries, which won the Pulitzer Prize in the United States and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in Canada, and concluding with Unless—by revealing to her the possibilities of the novel. Literary critics Cynthia Sugars, Brenda Beckman-Long, Christian Riegel, Warren Cariou, Wendy Roy, and Smaro Kaboureli read her last and most highly acclaimed novels—Swann: A Mystery (1987), The Republic of Love (1992), The Stone Diaries (1993), Larry’s Party (1997), and Unless (2002)—through the lens of her nonfiction.
An Afterword by Alex Ramon emphasizes the influence of Shields’s numerous book reviews on her own fiction, and an Epilogue by Aritha van Herk celebrates Shields’s love of revision, rounding out this comprehensive reappraisal of Carol Shields’s oeuvre by relating her essays to her fiction, following Shields’s example of crossing borders between genres.
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Notes
- 1.
In her story “Dying for Love” in Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000) Shields’s suicidal heroine clings to a “slender handrail of hope” (48). In her “Introduction: Potluck” to Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo, van Herk coins the phrase “a handrail to creation” (4).
- 2.
This essay was first published in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary edited by Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones for McGill-Queen’s U P in 2007 on pages 59–79.
- 3.
The essays of Margaret Atwood, including those in her collection Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, exemplify the range of her non-fiction, as it applies to her own fiction.
- 4.
See The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields (2021) edited by Nora Foster Stovel.
- 5.
Shields employs this phrase in her essay “The Short Story (and Women Writers)” (Startle 103). Please see Nora Foster Stovel’s essay, “‘American or Canadian’: Carol Shields’s Border Crossings” in A Review of Canadian Studies in the United States 40. 4 (December 2010): 517–29. Print.
- 6.
Anne Giardini composed “A Wood” as a sequel to the original story for Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo.
- 7.
The narrator in Unless echoes these sentiments: “I am willing to blurt it all out, if only to myself. Blurting is a form of bravery. I’m just catching on to that fact. Arriving late, as always” (270). “Be bold all the way through” is the title of a chapter in Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing (141–8) and echoes the advice she gave to her writing students.
- 8.
“A View from the Edge” was delivered as an address at Harvard University in 1997 and published in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, edited by Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones in 2007. It is partially included in “Writers Are Readers First” in Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing (1–14).
- 9.
“Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard” was previously published in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, edited by Edward Eden and Dee Goertz. In the Giardini edition, previously published essays are often given new names that lead us to read familiar essays with new eyes. For example, “Open Every Question, Every Possibility” (Startle 115–30) is a retitling of “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard”; “Writing from the Edge” (Startle 131–40) is a retitling of “A View from the Edge of the Edge,” and “Writing What We’ve Discovered—So Far” (Startle 109–14) was originally titled “The New New New Fiction.”
- 10.
In “‘Controlled Chaos’ and Carol Shields’s ‘A View from the Edge of the Edge’” Marta Dvořák refers to “the modernist and postmodern break with realism and its rule of plausibility.”
- 11.
Howell’s essay was first published under the title “Space for Strangeness: Carol Shields’s Short Stories” in Open Letter 13.2 (Spring 2007): 40–51. It has been substantially revised.
- 12.
In my May 2003 interview with Shields, she told me that, in her first class at the University of Ottawa, a night course in creative writing, she had a class of “mature” women and “puerile” men—so different that she thought the room would overbalance. She said she was rather “school-marmish” at first. Her story “Chemistry” was inspired by this class, although she altered the course subject matter from a creative writing class to a class in playing the recorder. She remained friends with some of the women who kept in touch with her and also kept on writing. Later, she taught creative writing for one year at the University of British Columbia.
- 13.
Sugars’s chapter is a substantially revised reprint of an essay first published in The Worlds of Carol Shields, edited by David Staines (2014).
Cariou’s chapter is a substantially revised reprint of “Larry’s Party: Man in the Maze” published in Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life.
- 14.
See Wendy Roy’s “Revisiting the Sequel: Carol Shields’s Companion Novels.”
- 15.
Beckman-Long is the author of Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic (2015).
Works Cited
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———. “Arriving Late: Starting Over.” How Stories Mean. Ed. John Metcalf and J. R. Struthers. Erin: Porcupine’s Quill, 1993. 87–90 and 244–51. Print.
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———. “Chemistry.” The Orange Fish: The Collected Stories. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004a. 228–247. Print.
———. “Coming to Canada—Age Twenty-Two” in Coming to Canada: Poems. Ottawa, Canada: Carleton University Press, 1992: 27. Print.
———. “Dying for Love.” Dressing Up for the Carnival: The Collected Stories. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004b. 431–439. Print.
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———. “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard” in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction. Ed. Edward Eden and Dee Goertz. Toronto, ON: U of Toronto P, 2003. 19–36. Print.
———. “The Short Story (and Women Writers).” Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing. Ed. Anne Giardini and Nicholas Giardini. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2016. (97–107). Print.
———. Unless. London; New York: Fourth Estate, 2002. Print.
———. “A View from the Edge of the Edge.” Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary. Ed. Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. 17–29. Print.
Van Herk, Aritha. “Introduction: Potluck.” Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo. Ed. Aritha van Herk and Connie Marcuse. Groningen: Barkhuis, 2009. 1–5, Print.
Stovel, Nora Foster. “‘American or Canadian’: Carol Shields’s Border Crossings.” A Review of Canadian Studies in the United States 40. 4 (December 2010): 517–29. Print.
———. The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields. Ed. Nora Foster Stovel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021. Print.
———. “Recognition and Revelations”: Margaret Laurence’s Essays. Ed. Nora Foster Stovel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U P, 2020. Print.
———. Relating Carol Shields Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders. Ed. Nora Foster Stovel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Print.
Verduyn, Christl, “(Es)saying It Her Way: Carol Shields as Essayist.” Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary. Ed Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s U P, 2007. 59–79. Reprinted in Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel. Print.
Wachtel, Eleanor. Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields. Fredericton, N.B.: Goose Lane Editions, 2007. Print.
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Stovel, N.F. (2023). Introduction: Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders. In: Stovel, N.F. (eds) Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11480-9_1
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