SOURCE: Colvin, Clare. “Carol Shields.” Independent, no. 5226 (18 July 2003): 17.

In the following obituary, Colvin provides a brief overview of Shields's life and work.

The success of Carol Shields' novels lies in the immaculate style of her writing and her feeling for the detail in everyday lives, together with a darker undercurrent that acknowledges how provisional is life itself.

Shields herself had to face the arbitrary nature of tragedy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998, soon after winning the Orange Prize for her novel Larry's Party. After undergoing a mastectomy, she embarked on several courses of chemotherapy, knowing that this was a palliative measure to prolong her life rather than a means of recovery. While fighting the illness, she wrote a biography, Jane Austen (2001), and a final novel, Unless (2002), about a woman writer immersed in a family crisis when her beloved daughter inexplicably becomes a vagrant. The first...