Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [0]
Carol Shields
SUMMARY:
The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman's life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century. Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
carol shields The Stone Diaries Introduction by penelope lively
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.
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80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate Limited 1993
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
This edition with an introduction by Penelope Lively published 2008
Copyright © Carol Shields, 1993
Introduction copyright © Penelope Lively, 2008
All rights reserved Publisher’s Note This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Shields, Carol.
The stone diaries Carol Shields ; introduction by Penelope Lively.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics deluxe edition)
ISBN: 1-4295-6172-6
1. Women—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.S514S76 2008
813'.54—dc22
2008028398
Set in Filosofia
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)
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