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The Stone Diaries

by

Carol Shields

For my sister, Babs

A number of people have read the manuscript for this book and offered encouragement and suggestions. I thank Blanche Howard, Joan Clark, Jim Keller, Anne Giardini, Catherine, Meg and Sara Shields, and, especially, Miss Louise Wyatt of London, Ontario.

Nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music (From “The Grandmother Cycle” by Judith Downing, Converse Quarterly, Autumn)

About Author

Carol Shields (1935–2000) is the author of Dressing Up for the Carnival; Larry’s Party, which won the Orange Prize; and The Stone Diaries, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other novels and short story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Swann, The Orange Fish, Various Miracles, The Box Garden, and Small Ceremonies.

Penelope Lively is the author of numerous award-winning novels, including The Photograph, Consequences, and the Booker Prize — winning Moon Tiger. She lives in London.

INTRODUCTION

The best fiction surprises — and withholds. Each time that I read The Stone Diaries I see it differently. It is a story, first of all — the story of a woman, Daisy Goodwill, later Daisy Goodwill Flett. It is also many stories — those of her family and her friends. You read it first as such, drawn in at once by the compelling opening pages, and then keen to know what is going to happen — to Daisy, to the rest of them. Subsequently it becomes a view of how one woman — many women — lived in the twentieth century, what they expected and what was expected of them.

It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence — the way in which there is no single truth about anyone’s life, but as many truths as there are observers.

And if you are interested in how a novel is made, it turns into an exercise in narrative technique. And, perhaps, airily — a demonstration of how a novelist can successfully juggle a cast of twenty characters and more over time and space without bewildering the reader.

Here is a story that opens in Manitoba in 1905 and ends in Florida in the 1990s. From birth to death — the parabola of a life, a North American life, with brief excursions to France, to Orkney. Daisy is born into a world that has known neither of the world wars, and in which a woman is required to be first and foremost a domestic support system. She leaves another one in which the globe has contracted and women expect to work outside the home. Her father-in-law sails the Atlantic as a young immigrant from Orkney: At the end of the century Daisy will fly the ocean to trace him. She has experienced the century in a temporal sense, but, as we learn in one of the novel’s deft commentaries, she has never known nude bathing, pierced ears, body massage, and much else that could be seen to characterize the age. Born in “the murderously hot back kitchen” of a Manitoba stone-worker’s home, she will spend her last years in a three-bedroom Florida condo, a Florida bluehead in a turquoise pantsuit.