The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays

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Shields brings together fifty short writings by Carol Shields (1935–2003), including more than two dozen previously unpublished short stories and essays and two dozen essays previously published but never before collected.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.