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    A Study Guide for Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries"
    A Study Guide for Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries"
    A Study Guide for Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries"
    Ebook59 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535839792
    A Study Guide for Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries"

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      A Study Guide for Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries" - Gale

      1

      The Stone Diaries

      Carol Shields

      1993

      Introduction

      The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields is the story of an ordinary woman's life, told in an unusual combination of shifting first- and third-person points of view. Daisy Goodwill Flett is both the narrator and the subject of her life's story, which spans and reflects the changing social and family scenes in North America during the twentieth century. A work of fiction, The Stone Diaries presents itself as a mix of autobiography, biography, and historical memoir and contains as well a compilation of papers and family photos which purport to belong to or be relevant to the protagonist. To read this novel is to feel on some level as though one is compiling a report from various sources regarding the protagonist, Daisy Goodwill Flett. The 1993 novel was exceedingly well received in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, and established Shields as one of the twentieth century's finest novelists writing in English.

      Author Biography

      Carol Shields was born June 2, 1935, in Oak Park, Illinois, to middle-class parents, her father the owner of a candy store, her mother a teacher. Interested in writing during her teen years, Shields attended Hanover College in Indiana and spent a semester abroad at Exeter University in England where she met her future husband, Don Shields. The couple was married in 1957, settled in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and eventually had five children.

      By the time Shields was thirty-three, she aspired to obtaining a master's degree. She graduated from Ottawa University in 1975. Thereafter, she began working, at first editing part time from home and also writing short stories. Material she had found while conducting research for her master's essay provided Shields with a plot for her first novel, Small Ceremonies, which was published in 1976. Next, she wrote The Box Garden and Happenstance, works that some criticized for being too domestic but which nonetheless identified Shields's chosen subject, women at home with their families.

      With an established readership in Canada, Shields gained both U.S. and British recognition with her 1987 publication of the novel Mary Swann. But far and away more successful was her 1994 novel, The Stone Diaries, which won awards in Great Britain and in North America. In the United States the novel won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.

      Following the 1997 publication of Larry's Party, the first Shields novel with a male protagonist, the author was diagnosed with breast cancer. She retired from her two-decade-long tenure at the University of Manitoba, and she and her husband moved to British Columbia. While receiving treatment there, Shields wrote and published in 2002 her last novel Unless. Shields died at the age of sixty-eight on July 16, 2003, at home in Victoria.

      Plot Summary

      Epigraph and Genealogy

      The Stone Diaries begins with an epigraph, which is identified as a quotation from a poem, The Grandmother Cycle by Judith Downing, published in Converse Quarterly in Autumn, no year given. Judith Downing is a granddaughter of Daisy Goodwill Flett. The quotation, which appears on the page before the genealogy, stresses the failure of communication to convey exactly what is intended; yet it affirms the value of the individual who attempts to communicate. Despite the discrepancy between intention and statement or action, a person's life is still important, the quotation asserts, and could be called a monument. This epigraph, which claims to be a quotation from a published poem written by a real person, initiates the pretense maintained throughout that the text is a factual record and not fiction. Moreover, the point that the life lived is a person's true monument counteracts the effect of the stone monument Cuyler Goodwill erects over the grave of his first wife, Mercy Stone Goodwill. Ironically, that stone monument hides altogether the grave marker which records the dates of Mercy's brief life and thus the monument eclipses the facts of the life it seeks to memorialize.

      The genealogy includes four generations of the Goodwill and Flett families. The span of years encompasses just about all of the twentieth century. Daisy is born in

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