"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.
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"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.
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pp. 361. 8vo. Black-and-white illustrations. Smudges to top page edge, water marks extending from bottom edge to foredge, else very good in very good dust jacket with a few minor scuffs, creases and spots. This is the most widely-read, critically acclaimed novel written by Carol Shields, one of the most outstanding authors writing in Canada in the last 25 years.
Carol Shields wrote this autobiographical fiction that reflects the life of Daisy Goodwill from her tragic birth to her sad death through diaries and letters. Daisy, as well as the many other characters who hover around her, is lonely, trying to figure out what she can do with her life, what could bring her happiness and satisfaction. The reader is brought into her world, a world that has probably been that of many other women of the time, through opinions and events that construct her character of a typical woman of the beginning of the century frustrated to have no other purpose than motherhood. While she does not find her life's purpose in working as a journalist, she grows and develops into an accomplished and remembered woman who mirrors, to the reader, the reality and difficulty of trying to find a voice and a place in a society just starting to consider women as independent individuals capable of more than simply cooking, cleaning and caring for others (read: men). Beautifully written, Shields' novel is touching, easy to read and her characters are more than realistic; the reader rapidly becomes a part of the family as he/she reads the diary and the letters and the characters reminded me of people I know, of personalities I've encountered, of life issues I have had to deal with as life went by. The Stones Diaries won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1995 and remains, to this day, a classic of Canadian Literature and of Women Literature.
