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

Carol Shields, 68, whose empathetic and witty novels about the lives of ordinary people included the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Stone Diaries, died July 16 at her home in Victoria, B.C. She had breast cancer.

A native of Illinois who had lived in Canada since 1957, Mrs. Shields published her first novel at age 40. She soon became a respected author in her adopted country, but was relatively unknown in America until publication of The Stone Diaries, which won her international recognition, including the 1995 Pulitzer for fiction.

The book became a bestseller and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States and the Governor General's Literary Award in Canada. It was also shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize.

Mrs. Shields said her story of a woman named Daisy Goodwill, who progresses from miserable beginnings to fulfillment in old age as a garden columnist, was basically about “birth, life, love, work, death …” In part, it reflected Mrs. Shields's own awakening to the women's movement of the 1960s, a period in which she was raising five children and composing poetry in snatched moments.

Daisy, she wrote, was “a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck.”

“I've been witness to this huge change for women in the second half of the 20th century,” Mrs. Shields said in an interview. “They say you write the same novel over and over, and the idea of women being fully human has always been a preoccupation [of mine].”

In another of her well-received novels, Larry's Party, about a man regarded by his acquaintances as “an unmemorable smudge in the yearbook,” Mrs. Shields turned her sympathetic eye to the lives of men.

“Men are portrayed as buffoons these days and I was trying not to do that,” she said in an interview, “but men are the ultimate mystery to me. I wanted to talk about this business of men in the world.” Larry's Party was awarded Britain's Orange Prize for novels written in English by women.

Mrs. Shields wrote 10 novels, including several after her cancer diagnosis more than five years ago. Her work Unless, published last year, was a Booker Prize finalist. She also wrote plays, biographies, three collections of short stories and three collections of poems. She taught English at the University of Manitoba, where she was university chancellor.

Carol Warner Shields became a naturalized Canadian with dual citizenship after her marriage in the 1950s to civil engineer Donald Shields. They met at the University of Exeter in England, where she was on an exchange program from Indiana's Hanover College.

She had five children in the decade of her twenties, and regarded it as a normal course of events that she would devote her life to family. Then she read Betty Friedan's watershed book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), which Mrs. Shields later described as “like a thunderbolt.”

“I came to feminism late,” Mrs. Shields told National Public Radio's Terry Gross on the “Fresh Air” program. “I knew there was something wrong, I just didn't know what it was.”

“I was astonished. I had no idea women thought like that or women could be anything other than what they were. … It did change the way that I thought about myself. I did begin to do a graduate degree part time, thought about doing some writing. It gave me courage.”

Some of her poetry was published in small journals and eventually in two books. She began part-time work editing a small literary journal and she wrote short stories that were broadcast on radio. She went on to receive a master's degree in English literature from the University of Ottawa.

Her first novel was Small Ceremonies. Other books included Swann, A Celibate Season, Thirteen Hands and a biography of Jane Austen.

Survivors include her husband and five children.