I read Carol Shields' first novel in the fall of 1978. I can date the moment exactly because, although I have no copy of the fan letter I wrote then, I do have her reply-written on a manual typewriter, postage to the USA 14 cents. At the time Carol was living at 6607 Churchill St. in Vancouver and teaching creative writing at UBC; I was at Radcliffe College working on the life of Katherine Anne Porter.

Small Ceremonies went to the heart of my preoccupations of that time, for in Judith Gill, Carol has created a complete portrait of a biographer. Gill's "lust"; for other peoples' stories forces her children to use protective strategies-locking diaries, taping closed their incoming mail. When she rents a house, Gill assembles the owner's character from letters, kitchen utensils and the contents of bathroom cupboards. This is me all over, and the darts must have hit home.

Yet Carol makes her character, a literary biographer, both conscientious and insightful. As Gill works on Susanna Moodie, she experiences the scrupulous biographer's guilt in exhuming another life. She frets about the interpretation of significant details, and sees her subject as a distant mirror in which she discerns her own image.

Carol could speak with authority on the subject, for she had served her own apprenticeship as a biographer. Her M.A. thesis was a biographical study of Susanna Moodie. When Carol discovered later that someone had stolen part of the Moodie archive, the theft inspired a second book-the mystery Swann.

When we eventually met, Carol and I found something else in common: in 1955 we had both been students at Exeter University in England. Carol was on a year's exchange program from Hanover College in Indiana, and I was a first year undergraduate. We must have passed in the streets for it was a small campus then, and I was in the habit of staring at the American co-eds, conspicuous in saddle shoes and bobby socks, while the rest of us wore matronly tweed suits and nylons. Moreover I saw the student production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which she played Cobweb-but memory refuses to speak.

Nevertheless I garnered one retrospective impression of Carol at Exeter: it is of her extraordinary single-mindedness about her future. There was no tension between marriage and career, or nervousness about juggling the two. She intended to marry and have children immediately, and she went ahead and did that. I link that sure sense of direction with her deftness in handling a plot. It bolsters my theory that there is a connection between a woman writer's capacity to plot her own life and her capacity to plot her characters' lives.

Over the years, our conversations during our sporadic meetings focused generally on life-writing. On one occasion I flew to Winnipeg to explore the possibility of writing a life of Dorothy Livesay. Because Carol knew Dorothy in Ottawa, we discussed key incidents in the poet's life. But there was a difference now. Carol herself had become an acclaimed author and a subject for biography in her own right. My Winnipeg diary offers a split-screen version of that week, with equal space given to Livesay's life and to Carol's opinions.

After we both moved to British Columbia, meetings became more frequent. Old professional habits die hard, and I sometimes wondered if Carol thought that a superannuated version of Judith Gill was facing her across the lunch table. She tolerated questions and theories even when they were off the mark. Was she, I asked, predisposed to value marriage so highly by growing up with a pair of twins, and feeling incomplete as the only "single"; in the family? No, that was not it, at all!

I knew she was working on a new novel, and the experience of reading Unless was for me one of both discovery and rediscovery. I'm struck again by Carol's sure sense of purpose and the coherence of her vision over 25 years. The link between the first and the latest book is asserted with calm assurance in the opening statements. Judith Gill says "the thought strikes me that I ought to be happier than I am."; Reta Winter's, in a lower register, says "It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now.";

Not only is the tonal range wider in Unless but also the thematic reach. Surprisingly, there is a strong feminist thrust. It is not, I think, a belated awareness so much as a latent force finally "blurted out."; "Blurting is a form of bravery,"; Reta says when she articulates the thought that women "fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our lips..."; Because she is translating the memoirs of a French feminist, scraps of her subject's theoretical "discourse"; punctuate her personal observations. The presence here of a character who is a cross between, say, Simone de Beauvoir and Helene Cixous constitutes another kind of "blurting out."; It reveals the intellectual and literary influences, hitherto concealed in her fiction, that are abundantly evident in
Carol's conversation.

In the small pantheon of women writers, comparisons to Jane Austen are inevitable. Sometimes this is sly "put down,"; suggesting a narrow domestic focus at the expense of larger social issues. Carol, in her biography of Jane Austen, reveals a subject far more worldly than is generally acknowledged, and perhaps welcomes the comparison. Nevertheless, because of the centrality of biography to her work, her important literary foremother is Virginia Woolf.

Since Woolf's father was a biographer, she grew up immersed in biography, and at the same time fiercely critical of Victorian biographies "dominated by the idea of goodness."; Woolf eventually wrote one serious biography and two mock biographies, all three brilliant in themselves but especially useful in shaping her theories about the portrayal of characters. The chief effect of writing biography on both Woolf and Shields is that it brings a particular focus to their representation of character. The similarity is underscored by the antiphonal effect of their voices on the subject:

"Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope."; (Woolf).

"A life is full of isolated events but these events if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together. (Shields).

"Lives which no longer express themselves in action take shape in innumerable words."; (Woolf).

"...unless, with its elegiac undertones, is a term used in logic, a word breathed by the hopeful or by writers of fiction wanting to prise open the crusted world and reveal another plane of being..."; (Shields).

Woolf believed that the ideal biography should combine both dream and reality, a combination she expressed as "a marriage of granite and rainbow."; Critics quickly seized the image as the perfect description for her own art. It seems to me to apply equally well to the art of Carol Shields-based solidly as it is in the daily world, and yet always suggesting an awareness of that other evanescent "plane of being.";

[Joan Givner / BCBW SUMMER 2002]