Shields, Carol (1935-2003), was an American-born novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and poet who lived in Canada from 1958 until her death. Shields’s fiction portrays female characters and loving relationships set against a realistic background of marriage and domestic life. Many of her stories and poems have a deceptive simplicity concealing more profound and stirring underlying themes. In many cases, they detail the extraordinary qualities of ordinary women. Her novel The Stone Diaries (1993), the chronicle of a woman’s life as it passes through many changes, was nominated for the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s best-known literary award, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1995.
Shields did not turn to writing until her late thirties. She began with two volumes of poetry, Others (1972) and Intersect (1974). Shields’s first published novel, Small Ceremonies (1976), won the Canadian Authors’ Association Prize for best novel. It was followed by its companion piece The Box Garden (1977). Her other works include the related novels Happenstance (1980) and A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982); and a literary mystery story, Swann (1987, published as Mary Swann in the United Kingdom). Shields then wrote a novel called A Celibate Season (1990) in collaboration with the Canadian writer Blanche Howard, and another novel, The Republic of Love (1992). A third volume of poetry, Coming to Canada, also appeared in 1992. Shields’s later works include the novel Larry’s Party (1997), a biography of the English novelist Jane Austen written in 2001, and the novel Unless (2002), about a mother whose daughter becomes a street beggar. Shields completed three collections of short stories during her lifetime that were reissued after her death as Collected Stories (2005).
Shields was born Carol Warner on June 2, 1935, in Oak Park, Illinois. She graduated from Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana, in 1957. She married Donald Hugh Shields, a professor of civil engineering, in 1957 while both were studying in England. Carol Shields lived in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, before settling in Winnipeg in 1994. She was a professor at the University of Manitoba from 1980 to 2000 and chancellor of the University of Winnipeg from 1996 to 2000. She died on July 16, 2003.
