
The autobiography of a fictional character, this novel charts the significant periods in the life of one Daisy Goodwill, born in 1905 in rural Manitoba. The novel dedicates one chapter apiece to birth, childhood, marriage, motherhood, etc, right up to (and including) death, which you have to admit is an unorthodox choice for a novel purportedly narrated by the protagonist (though often not in the first person).
Does it still count as a Bildungsroman if the protagonist constantly questions her own personal growth? Daisy is handed through her life from one caretaker to another: neighbour, father, husband, and, in her old age, children. She achieves a brief period of independence after the death of her husband, but never seems to escape the feeling that her life is happening to her without her intervention: “it’s occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves.”
An outline of the plot of this novel makes it sound like the most pedestrian narrative imaginable, but the genius of Shields is to make this provincial tale both lyrical and, somehow, thrilling. The protagonist’s birth in the first chapter takes place in heartbreaking circumstances that have made me call my husband a lot more than I usually would from work (that is, at all). Her short career as a writer for a magazine is in epistolary format, which manages to brilliantly convey its exact trajectory while giving almost no exposition. Her reflections on her own death are comitragic. Perhaps the author’s genius is most evident in a chapter in which Daisy’s family and friends each give “personal” (though seemingly constructed by the protagonist) views about the origins of her sudden period of depression.
It’s foolishness to feel that I “discovered” this novel, because it won the Pulitzer and was included on Feminista’s list of the 20th century’s top 100 books by female author. (I myself came across it through the review on Uncovered Classics, where Amy Collier characteristically gives it a much more insightful analysis than I am capable of). But I do feel that way, because have you ever heard of it? Like Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, another award-winner that seems to have unjustly vanished from popular consciousness, The Stone Diaries has faded from our cultural memory. I don’t think it’s paranoid to suspect that that’s because over half of it is about a married woman of middle age or older.