Carol Shields, shaping time, feminist rage, and the tyranny of plot

"If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself." —Alicia Ostriker

Novelist Carol Shields’s daughter, Anne Giardini, grew up hearing a story about her mother that she shares in the introduction to Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing:

When my mother graduated in 1957 from Hanover College, a small liberal arts school on the Ohio River near Madison, Indiana, she was already a promising writer, and had, as it h…