Yet after her MA thesis for which she researched the minor Victorian novelist Susanna Moodie she dropped out largely for her

Yet after her MA thesis, for which she researched the minor Victorian novelist Susanna Moodie, she dropped out, largely for her family but also to try to become a writer. Her first literary success was when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation awarded her a poetry prize in 1965 She was 29. “I wrote seven poems to enter, very much borrowed from the Philip Larkin style. I borrowed his sense of depression, too, so all my friends were phoning to see if I was having a nervous breakdown.” At the centre of the collection was a poem inspired by her small son. I don’t know where I had the energy, but I clearly had a lot of it in my twenties.”You would have got good odds on Shields becoming a full-time academic. We all seemed to marry right after our degrees and at the end of the first year we all had babies It seems incredible now.

She was studying literature on an exchange programme at Exeter University; he was a post-graduate engineering student from Canada, studying at Imperial College London. She had her first child just nine months into the marriage at 22.”It was just how we lived. They’re economically written and I think I’m less economic now I didn’t have much time to write when I wrote those books. Actually, I didn’t have much time to read, let alone write.”Around then, she would have been mostly occupied by her family Shields has four daughters and one son. (She shows everything she writes to her daughters, who make suggestions. One of them wrote “yuk” in the margin at one point in The Stone Diaries and Shields promptly took out the offending line.)She met her husband, Donald, in the late 1950s in Scotland on a trip there organised by the British Council. (In the one moment in our conversation in which she sounded faintly melancholic, she said she wished she was 10 years younger so that she could enjoy more the travelling which is now part of her lot.) Her first book published in Britain was Mary Swann.

Two more novels followed (Happenstance in 1991 and The Republic of Love in 1992) before The Stone Diaries. Now, after Various Miracles, a collection of short stories published last year, her publishers have gone back to pick up the first two novels (Small Cermonies and The Box Garden) and Shields finds herself talking about books she wrote nearly 20 years ago.”I had to re-read them,” she said, “because you forget a lot of things People’s names and whole scenes These books are not very dense. Shields immediate and only question was: “Are there any women in it?”Shields was not an early starter : her first novel was published in 1976 in the week of her 40th birthday. I thought the author of a play about bridge (Thirteen Hands, which premiered in Toronto this year) might be interested in a play about poker (Dealer’s Choice by Patrick Marber). At the end of our interview, she asked me if I could recommend any plays in London. During our conversation, her feminism would occasionally surface abruptly. It’s a congenital condition.” But this is not to say Shields is prepared to blank herself out at all times.