Carol Shields

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Standard Name: Shields, Carol
Birth Name: Carol Ann Warner
CS , an American-born Canadian novelist of the twentieth century, a low-key but passionate feminist, published a collection of poetry as her first book. Her earliest novel features as minor character a novelist whose stock-in-trade is to be Canadian but who is by birth (secretly) an American. Her novels probe the freight of meaning in the small change of ordinary lives, especially those of women, and the way that an ordinary person becomes an artist. They delight in self-reflexiveness, and combine self-conscious artistry with a disarming appearance of transcription from life. CS also wrote short fiction and plays.
Colour photo of Carolyn Shields taken outside at her home in Victoria, Canada, 1995. Shot from below, she looks off-camera, wears a red tartan scarf draped over her right shoulder, and is framed by tree branches overhead in a light blue, near-night sky.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Margaret Kennedy
A later novelist, Barbara Pym , thought of The Heroes of Clone as pattern for a fiction setting side by side what researchers and biographers write of a person's life and then what really did...
Intertextuality and Influence Philip Larkin
Anthony Thwaite edited PL 's Collected Poems in 1988 and his Selected Letters, 1940-1985, in 1992. Andrew Motion published a biography in 1993.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Both Alan Bennett and Martin Amis have edited selections of Larkin's...
Intertextuality and Influence Penelope Lively
PL wrote in 2010: I feel now as though someone else wrote it.
Lively, Penelope. “Guardian Book Club. On writing Moon TigerThe Guardian, 15 May 2010, p. Review 6.
Review 6
Thirty years after its appearance Sam Jordison described it as ferociously complicated and fantastically readable, structured like the device...
Intertextuality and Influence Penelope Lively
As controversy has been Henry's domain, reading has been Charlotte's. For ever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. Reading has taught her how sex...
Intertextuality and Influence Penelope Lively
Personal reflections on plants are one of her subjects here, along with gardening history, her varied experiences of being in gardens, and writers who have preceded her in touching on or immersing themselves in the...
Intertextuality and Influence Susanna Moodie
Roughing It in the Bush is now considered one of the most influential and foundational works of Canadian literature. It has made a deep impression upon many Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields
Literary responses Sara Jeannette Duncan
Canadian reviewers were cool about the book. It provoked the Globe, for example, to write as if its entire readership were male: [e]ven when our sisters and wives make a conscious effort to compass...
Literary responses Susanna Moodie
Carol Shields judged this a more mature and civilized book than Roughing It in the Bush, less vivid but more reflective, and interesting in its portrayal of its author as having learned to accept...
Literary responses Sylvia Townsend Warner
In her own more recent book on Austen, Carol Shields remarked that Warner here captured a brilliant life with her own sparkling prose . . . and demonstrated the powers of a short, short, short...
Literary responses Muriel Spark
Publication evoked a chorus of praise Frank Kermode , finding this a little miracle of a book, was not untypical.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009.
298
More recently and less sympathetically, Margaret Moan Rowe saw the social satire and spiritual...
Literary responses Susanna Moodie
Carol Shields in her monograph on SM offered a fairly stern judgement of her literary quality. Being paid by the page, said Shields, Moodie pads her work. Her straightforward expository style alternates with florid lyricism...
Literary responses Alice Munro
This was chosen as one of the year's best books by the New York Times Book Review.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Carol Shields brought a long perspective on AM 's work to her notice in the London Review...
Literary responses Edna O'Brien
Reviews of this novel were mixed. Anita Brookner expressed in the Spectator the view that O'Brien had failed to live up to her usual standard.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Carol Shields wrote in the Globe and Mail:...
Literary responses Deborah Levy
Hot Milk was listed as one of the New York Times' 100 most notable books of 2016. Columnist Mariella Frostrup called it mesmerising and slightly hallucinogenic . . . . I haven't admired a...
Literary responses Susanna Moodie
Hugh Latimer was particularly successful, and went through several editions and a sequel.
Peterman, Michael. Susanna Moodie: A Life. ECW Press, 1999.
32
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
To Carol Shields , The Little Prisoner and others like it are epics tinged with sadism.
Shields, Carol. Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Borealis Press, 1977.
70

Timeline

25 May 1995: Naim Attallah, proprietor of the Women's...

Writing climate item

25 May 1995

Naim Attallah , proprietor of the Women's Press, published his first novel, entitled A Timeless Passion. Like all his other works, it was later asserted to be actually ghost-written, every word, by his...

22 October 2002: The Booker Prize was awarded for the first...

Writing climate item

22 October 2002

The Booker Prize was awarded for the first time as the Man Booker Prize, its sponsorship having passed to the Man Group , a Canadian venture capital company.
“Booker Prize 2002”. Guardian Unlimited.

Texts

Shields, Carol, and Blanche Howard. A Celibate Season. Coteau Books, 1991.
Shields, Carol. A Fairly Conventional Woman. Macmillan of Canada, 1982.
Shields, Carol. Coming to Canada: Poems. Carleton University Press, 1992.
Shields, Carol. Departures and Arrivals. Blizzard Pub., 1990.
Shields, Carol. Dressing Up for the Carnival. 1st Canadian Edition, Random House Canada, 2000.
Shields, Carol et al., editors. Dropped Threads 2: more of what we aren’t told. Vintage Canada, 2003.
Shields, Carol, and Marjorie Anderson, editors. Dropped Threads: what we aren’t told. Vintage Canada, 2001.
Shields, Carol, and Catherine Shields. Fashion, Power, Guilt, and the Charity of Families. Blizzard Pub., 1993.
Shields, Carol. Happenstance: A Novel. McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, 1980.
Shields, Carol. Intersect: Poems. Borealis Press, 1974.
Shields, Carol. “Introduction”. Coming to Canada: Poems, edited by Christopher Levenson, Carleton University Press, 1998, p. xi - xxv.
Shields, Carol. Jane Austen. Viking, 2001.
Shields, Carol. Larry’s Party. 1st Canadian Edition, Random House Canada, 1997.
Shields, Carol. Others. Borealis Press, 1972.
Shields, Carol. “Rereadings: Beautiful youth”. The Guardian, p. G2: 29.
Shields, Carol. Small Ceremonies. McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, 1976.
Shields, Carol. Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Borealis Press, 1977.
Shields, Carol. Swann: A Mystery. Stoddart, 1987.
Shields, Carol. Swann: A Mystery. Vintage Canada, 1995.
Shields, Carol. The Box Garden. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977.
Shields, Carol. The Collected Stories. Random House Canada, 2004.
Shields, Carol. The Collected Stories. Vintage, 2005.
Shields, Carol. The Orange Fish. Random House, 1989.
Shields, Carol. The Republic of Love. Random House of Canada, 1992.
Shields, Carol. The Stone Diaries. Vintage Books, 1993.