Susan Hickman
While Prime Minister Jean Chrétien named Canadian author Carol Shields "one of the bright lights of Canadian literature" after her death on July 16th, several University of Ottawa professors recalled the days when Shields was a "luminous presence" in the halls of the English department.
One of this country's most celebrated and beloved authors, Shields died in Victoria at the age of 68, of complications from breast cancer.
Retired English professor Glenn Clever, who supervised her master's thesis in the early 1970s, says there was no other student quite like Shields, who studied his course on the history of the English novel. Her thesis about 19th-century Canadian writer Susanna Moodie was published in 1977.
"She stood head and shoulders above the run-of-the-mill grad student," says Clever. "She was an excellent student, very contributive in class and very much interested in the technique of the novel. She took over my class for me a couple of times and her work was very admirable. I never ever quite had another student like her."
Clever and retired English professor Frank Tierney were responsible for initiating the Canadian literature program at the University of Ottawa about the time Shields was working on her master's degree. The pair introduced several Canadian courses and established Borealis Press, which published Shields's thesis, as well as her first two books of poetry, Others (1972) and Intersect (1974).
Tierney recalls her reluctance to publish her thesis. "(Clever and I) believed it made a contribution to the study of Moodie. We also encouraged her to write poetry. She was very modest and hesitant."
English professor Seymour Mayne also recalls Shields's "very self-effacing smile and unassuming nature."
Long before Shields became a prolific writer, she was happy to return to the University of Ottawa to give readings from her first books. Once she had a few novels, books of short stories and a play under her belt, she returned to the University of Ottawa as a writer-in-residence.
English professor Gerald Lynch remembers that "she was a luminous presence, bright, cheerful, always in a good mood, ready to chat and make jokes."
Tierney and his wife, who were raising several children at the time, often had dinner with Shields and her husband. He remembers driving Shields home one night after a reading.
"She had a small family at that time, and I asked her when she found time to write. She said: ‘Frank, I write when I'm stirring the porridge in the morning.’ She said sometimes, while she was standing there by the stove stirring the porridge, she would suddenly forget what she was doing."
Tierney says now he feels humbled to have been a part of the growing literary career of Carol Shields. "But she really did it all herself. She just needed some focus, someone to say, ‘You can do that.’"
Shields won many prizes for her writing, including the Pulitzer Prize for her 1993 novel, The Stone Diaries. Her latest novel, Unless, was nominated for a Giller Prize and shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction, given to the best book by a female writer in the English-speaking world.
Citation for Carol Shields upon her receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa, June 1995 (Bilingual text)
