“I wanted to bring the unpublished works to light,” says editor Nora Foster Stovel about her new project, a collection of writings by the late author Carol Shields, titled The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays. 

Stovel is a professor emerita at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, who has edited numerous books about Canadian women writers, with two other volumes on Carol Shields’s writing among them. 

Shields (1935–2003) was an acclaimed American-born author who moved to Canada in 1957 as a young bride. At the age of 40, she completed an M.A. in Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa and thereafter started writing fiction. 

Shields’s literary output included ten novels, four short story collections, four poetry books, six plays, a book of criticism, and a biography of Jane Austen, while she also co-edited two anthologies. 

Her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries won both the Pulitzer Prize and Governor General’s Award and also received a Booker Prize nomination. In addition to numerous other literary awards, Shields received 15 honorary PhDs. 

This new compilation of Shields’s work includes three previously unpublished short stories, along with 24 previously unpublished essays and an equal number of previously published but uncollected essays. This is the first time they have appeared together in one volume.

Stovel says the book is intended for general readers, especially fellow writers and admirers. She hopes that the collection will make people want to read more of Shields’s work and perhaps write some of their own. 

The book’s clever title affirms Shields’s prominent role in Canadian literature. “By writing about her adopted country and its writers, she earned the title the Canadian Shields,” Stovel asserts. 

“In fact, Shields spent 46 years, more than two-thirds of her life in Canadian cities, such as Toronto, Ottawa, and Victoria, her longest stint being in Winnipeg.”

For Stovel, putting the book together was a formidable task. There were more than 200 archival boxes of Shields’s fonds to go through. “The biggest challenge was travelling to Ottawa a number of times and spending many hours sifting through all the material,” she says. 

As a result, the editing process involved several steps. “After selecting the items and requesting photocopies from the National Library, I had to retype them, organize them, and write introductions,” Stovel says. 

Those introductions are one of the treats of this meticulously edited book, which includes not only an introduction to the collection as a whole, but also one to each of the two sections. Stovel shares her enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge about Shields, interspersing the commentaries with lively anecdotal details about her. 

The first section of previously unpublished work includes three short stories – about loss, a mother/daughter relationship, and a family drive across Canada – and essays that cover topics such as memories, coming to Canada, the reading/writing connection, and the writing process. 

The second section includes essays that first appeared in travel and women’s magazines, in literary journals, and as introductions/afterwords to books. Depending on the original intended audience, some topics are more personal, while others address cultural issues.

In Stovel’s words, “What surprised me the most was the wide range of Shields’ interests, from travel to divorce and from petals to purses.”