Abstract
Christl Verduyn explains in her Prologue, “(Es)saying It Her Way: Carol Shields as Essayist,” the essay genre lent itself extremely well to Carol Shields’s writing skills and, in particular, to her belief in the centrality of story or narrative to life and to its artistic representation. For Shields the essay offered a flexible form of writing with which to reflect on and explore the power of narrative and the connections and contradictions in human experience. Her essays illuminate her understanding of narrative as getting “inside reality rather than getting reality right” (“Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard” 35). Her particular style of essay-writing represents a kind of symbiosis between the broad essay genre and her personal artistic vision. For Shields, an essay could draw as comfortably and usefully on fiction as on fact, making her essays as compelling and satisfying as her fiction. While lesser known than her fiction, Shields’s accomplishments as an essayist were considerable and offer insights into her objectives as a writer and how she accomplished them.
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Notes
- 1.
Mark Lawson, “Interview with Carol Shields.” Front Row, BBC Radio 4, 6 March 2001, 7:15 p.m., quoted in Faye Hammill, “My Own Life Will Never Be Enough for Me: Carol Shields as Biographer [Jane Austen].” American Review of Canadian Studies, 32, no. 1 (spring 2002), 143–148.
- 2.
Early in his study of the genre, The Observing Self, Good discusses the essay as “a sort of fiction, in the context of the novel” (12), “a non-fictional cognate of certain kinds of fiction” (13).
- 3.
Archival copy, dated 15 March 1995, later revised 31 August 1995 and delivered as an address at Hanover College, 26 September 1996. I heard a version of the essay as a keynote speech at the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, in August 1999. A final version of the essay is featured in Eden and Goertz, Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction.
- 4.
See Scholes and Klaus, Elements of the Essay.
- 5.
See Kirklighter, Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay.
- 6.
When, in April 1997, Toronto Star literary reviewer Bert Archer complained that he could not remember the last time he had read a good essay published in Canada, he apparently had not been reading the essays of the country’s women writers. See Bert Archer, “The Art of the Essay,” Toronto Star, 5 April 1997, M16. “Essay writing is an art and a skill,” Archer stated, lamenting what he saw as a lack of good essayists in Canada.
- 7.
Shields, “Giving Your Literary Papers Away;” “Framing the Structure of a Novel;” “Making Words/Finding Stories;” “What’s in a Picture;” “The Personal Library;” “Leaving the Brick House Behind;” “Jane Austen: Images of the Body;” “Creative Writing Courses;” “‘Thinking Back through Our Mothers’;” “Marian Engel Award Acceptance Speech 1990;” “News from Another Country;” “A View from the Edge of the Edge.”
- 8.
This is a topic worth exploring further. Speaking with Ann Dowsett Johnston about writing Unless (Maclean’s 115, no. 15 [15 April 2002]: 48–51), Shields remarked how she was “more at ease with writing this novel than with others. Cancer makes one serious, and awake.” Speaking earlier with Jennifer Jackson (“‘Soft-spoken Subversive’ Doing What She Loves,” Kingston-Whig Standard, 13 March 2001), Shields observed that “this state of being awake [following the birth of her first child, at the age of twenty-two, which snapped her out of a ‘rather sleepy girlhood’] spread to the rest of my life and, I believe, made me more alert, more perceptive, more aware of the shades of feeling, of the large and small collisions of personality.” Earlier still, “in her 1996 address at the graduation ceremonies for the Balmoral Hall School for Girls in Winnipeg, Shields, as Lesley Hughes recounted in Chatelaine, stated … ‘Just wake up and be yourself’” (quoted in Contemporary Canadian Biographies, August 1997).
- 9.
The contributors include writers, academics, ranchers, politicians, homemakers, journalists, and lawyers.
- 10.
See Shields’s 15 March 1995 draft of “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard” (lac, Carol Shields fonds) for more on “the glance”: “Such a wealth of material to draw on, but never … quite … enough. And never quite accurate either, glancing off the epic of human experience rather than reflecting it back to us” (4). The opening image of this essay—a Parisian street person with a sign that reads “J’ai faim” around his neck—seems to anticipate the narrator’s daughter in Unless.
- 11.
Shields, 15 March 1995 draft of “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,” 4.
- 12.
In Eden and Goertz, Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, 19–36.
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———. “What’s in a Picture,” Civilization, vol. 3, no. 5, 1996b. 112.
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Verduyn, C. (2023). Prologue: (Es)Saying It Her Way: Carol Shields as Essayist. In: Stovel, N.F. (eds) Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11480-9_2
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