CAROL SHIELDS PUBLISHED four novels in utter obscurity in the first five decades of her life, before finding a international readership in 1987 with Swann (published as Mary Swann in the UK), and going on to win a Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries and the Orange Prize for Larry’s Party. Her last novel, Unless, was shortlisted for the Booker (as The Stone Diaries had also been), just before she died of breast cancer in 2003. Shields’s passing has caused a kind of hagiography to grow up around her output, the most recent manifestation of which is the publication of these Collected Stories. The collection consists of three previously published volumes of short stories – Various Miracles (1985), The Orange Fish (1989, but not previously published in the UK) and Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000) – plus her last work, Segue.

As one of Shields’s earliest admirers, I feel slightly uncomfortable asking if this is not inflating a reputation too far. Shields was exceptionally good at playing with the form of the novel, and around this interest, which was as much poetic as modernist, she fashioned tales of domestic ups and downs with real perceptiveness and style. Yet it is worth remembering what she did not do. She did not, for instance, create a single memorable character – one who, like Emma Woodhouse or Augie March, you instantly knew and recognised. To be able to do so is the best hallmark of a really great writer. Her characters were in fact blanks who refused to occupy their lives, instead preferring, like Mary Swann in Swann or Daisy Goodwill in the Stone Diaries, to leave fragments of themselves for others to assemble. Hillary Mantel has written of Shields that ‘It is her specialty to isolate moments that remain distinct in the mind for years, perhaps a lifetime,’ but this, too, is questionable. Despite the elegance and intelligence of her prose, Shields did not write a single memorable phrase, not even about the issue that clearly preoccupied and enraged her right up to her death (one which, actually, exercises a great number of other women novelists) – namely, why it is that the work of women novelists in general tends to be dismissed as minor or trivial. Shields’s struggle may have seemed long and unjust to her, but after Swann was published in 1987 it was effectively over.

It is interesting to read the short stories with this in mind, for, of all the o@ collections, Dressing Up for the Carnival is notably the most buoyant in tone and content. It includes ‘Scarf’, a chapter from Unless that gives a completely misleading impression of that sombre, painful and quite maddening novel, in which Reta Winters searches for the perfect scarf she imagines for her friend Gwen, and finds it. Reta has won a prize; her fiiend, also a novelist, hasn’t, despite her ‘wonderful r& on buttonholes’. Reta thinks of other women in her life and concludes, ‘Not one of us was going to get what we wanted. Imagine someone writing a play called “Death of a Saleswoman”. What a joke. . . . We ask ourselves questions, endlessly, but not sternly enough.’

Well, yes. If you ask questions of these stories about the human condition, the answers they give are not really satisfactory – not for a Collected Stories. They are charming, witty, clever, but they do not sound the deeper notes that the best of Shields’s novels did. Perfectly suited to being read aloud on Radio 4, they usually feature happily married, middle-aged women with a mildly qulrky take on their own lives, a degree in English literature, an occasional bestseller, and no interest whatsoever in the wider shores of existence. One can’t help wondering just how autobiographical this all is. The most extreme, and by far the most entertaining, is ‘Dressing Down’, featuring a naturist grandfather whose wife is humiliated by ‘playing Adam and Eve at the beach’ and persuaded to continue by his promise to abstain from sex, ‘their greatest personal pleasure’. (Sex is never disappointing in a Shields story.) He is a rare creature, in what is otherwise a parade of middle-class couples, all of whom blur into the same pinkish, wrlnkly pairs, bemoaning their mortality but not doing anything much to counter it. In Segue another aging wife writes sonnets, aware that she will never be as important to her husband Max as his new manuscript. There is, here, the potential for comedy, which a more ruthless, less solipsistic novelist would have enjoyed exploring.

Max believes that ‘every novel, whatever its genre or subject, is about death.’ His wife remarks, ‘I have certainly never bought that one, not for a minute. A novel is about everything it touches upon.’ Both, of course, are right. Shields touched upon death, the making of art (particularly poetry and fiction), love, marriage and, in her last and first novels, families: but the paradox of her international success’ makes her character’s feelings of being marginalised within their own lives increasingly implausible. Loneliness, failure, depression and bereavement do not feel like this. Shields was not mareinalised, not for the last and most productive decades of Ker life; did when she gives explanation to the feelings of fictional creations who are supposed to be, one is unconvinced to the point of exasperation. What, really, do these lucky people have to bleat about? They have run out of conversation: that is the worst of it. Chekhov, another dying writer, imbued his short stories with unforgettable anguish – a pathos, comedy and sensitivity that, in describing a similarly leisured class, evoke the quintessence of all our lives. Shields did great things for the frustrated twentieth-century Canadian housewife. She was right to be angry at her minority appeal: but, in the end, she vented her anger in the wrong direction.