A Literary Foremother: Iris Murdoch and Carol Shields

Abstract

In this volume, Nick Turner notes the infrequency with which contemporary novelists have cited Murdoch as an influence upon their fiction, despite the indication of ‘Murdochian elements’ in their work. Carol Shields’s remark in a 1998 interview that she ‘read everything that Iris Murdoch wrote as it was published’,1 may not constitute a direct admission of influence, but it is, nonetheless, a comment worthy of investigation, given some intriguing, and hitherto unexamined, connections between her and Murdoch’s fiction. In contrast with Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro, women writers who figured frequently in Shields’s list of literary influences, the cited interview is the only one in which Shields alluded to Murdoch directly. Yet there is further evidence which reveals her engagement with Murdoch’s writing.