An Interview with Carol Shields

Hollenberg, Donna Krolik

doi:10.2307/1208862

Cited by 5 publications

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“…The tendency to read this novel as autobiographical and stress its status as Shields' final novel, written whilst she was suffering from breast cancer, exacerbates this sense that this is a narrative not only about twenty-first-century feminism, but also about the gender politics of earlier generations of women, women who were writing in the postwar years or baby-boomer generation. Still, Reta, like Shields (see Hollenberg, 1998), started writing fiction relatively late and both author and protagonist suffer critical responses to their work that stress its lack of depth and ambition (see Ramon 2008, Eagleton 2005and Atwood 2005 for defences of Shields). Like Reta, Shields admitted to coming to feminism late (Stovel 2006: 51) and the story of Reta's struggles to articulate a coherent feminist narrative could indeed be Shields' own.…”

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The uneasy partnership of feminism and ageing in Carol Shields’s Unless

Falcus

2017

Journal of Romance Studies

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Unless (2002) is Canadian author Carol Shields' final novel, a text concerned with the mother-daughter relationship and a woman's place in a patriarchal world. It is also a novel about ageing and, particularly, with its forty-three to forty-four-year-old protagonist, about middle age. Attention to the novel's representation of time, ageing and generational identity suggests that a text usually read as Shields' most feminist work does not propound a clear and certain feminist narrative. Reta's story demonstrates that, despite the often-strident feminist politics of this novel, the implications and effects of the intersection of ageing and gender cannot be fully articulated. Following on from the proliferation of writing in English about women and ageing in the 1990s, Unless can be seen as part of an emergingand not necessarily coherentconversation about ageing and gender in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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confidence: 99%