Newly discovered work by one of Canada’s favourite writers

The Canadian Shields brings together fifty short writings by Carol Shields (1935–2003), including more than two dozen previously unpublished short stories and essays and two dozen essays previously published but never before collected. Invaluable to scholars and admirers of Shields’s work, the writings discovered in the National Library Archives by Nora Foster Stovel and presented to the public here for the first time reflect Shields’s interest in the relationships between reality and fiction, mothers and daughters, and gender and genre. They also reveal her love of Canada, especially Winnipeg, her home for twenty years. Originally written for women’s magazines, travel journals, convocation addresses, and even graduate school term papers, Shields’s imaginative essays explore ideas about home, Canadian literature, contemporary women’s writing, and the future of fiction. Whether autobiographical, cultural, or feminist in focus, these works vividly illuminate the multiple chapters of Shields’s writing life.

Margaret Atwood and Lorna Crozier frame Shields’s texts with tributes to her work and impact. An introduction by Stovel situates Shields as a Canadian author and subversive feminist writer, demonstrating how American-born-and-raised Carol Anne Warner became “the Canadian Shields”—a quintessential and beloved Canadian writer and the only author to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Fiction.

Contributor: Carol Shields

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

--- Contributor: Nora Foster Stovel

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 Writings, The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields, and Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders. 

"The book serves as a fitting homage to Carol Shields, and is worth reading by anyone interested in her writing. I recommend it to students, teachers, and enthusiasts." ---

"A most welcome, relevant and enjoyable addition to the Shields literature by a prominent Shields specialist.

[The Canadian Shields] succeeds in demonstrating what its title announces, that, like the Precambrian shield on which the whole country rests... Carol Shields is truly a cornerstone of Canadian literature, literally its bedrock, having immigrated to Canada in 1957, the same year the Canada Council for the Arts was founded, and then supporting other writers and artists throughout her life, being seen as a maternal figure."

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"Stovel's introductions are one of the treats of this meticulously edited book... Stovel shares her enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge about Shields, interspersing the commentaries with lively anecdotal details about her."

--- "There are some real insights here, small portals opened into this writer’s creative process and principles... 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." --- "I found myself making pages and pages of notes while I was making my way through this collection. I kept stumbling upon passages I knew I’d want to return to again and again. Shields has so many noteworthy things to say about reading, writing, and the value of women’s stories." --- "Editor Nora Foster Stovel has done us all a service by digging out the many short gems of wisdom, wit and honesty that mark the life of this wonderfully observant and sensitive writer." ---

"The Canadian Shields [is] enjoyable and satisfying for both the leisurely reader and the serious academic."