A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard.

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

In the early 1970s, Carol Shields lived in Ottawa with her husband Don, a professor at the university, and her five children. She loved to write and had published a book of poetry. Blanche Howard, 12 years her senior, also lived in Ottawa. Her husband, Bruce, was a member of parliament, and Blanche, too, was a writer. Howard’s first novel, The Manipulator, had just found a home with McClelland and Stewart when the two women connected at a University Women’s Club meeting in 1971. Shields and Howard soon became friends, and when Howard returned to British Columbia in 1976, their friendship became a primarily epistolary one. They wrote faithfully until Shields’ death in 2003.

Fortunately for the literary reader, Shields and Howard kept their correspondence, which is published under the title A Memoir of Friendship. The first nervous letter is a request from Shields to Howard for advice on a publishing contract, and the final one is a teary missive from Don, thanking Howard for the friendship that helped to sustain his wife through her last days. In between, A Memoir of Friendship takes the reader through the professional and personal lives of these extraordinary women.

Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, as novelists, shine in their ability to portray everyday living in an intelligent, insightful manner. Happily, that gift carries over into their epistolary writing. The letters examine everything from the Meech Lake Accord to aging, from the red tape in the publishing industry to crises in their own families. For the reader who is familiar with the work of these two writers, it is extremely interesting to see how the themes of their letters shaped their novels. Shields and Howard also use the letters to comment on each others’ works in progress, and to update each other on the development of their co-written novel, A Celibate Season, which lovers of Canadian literature will assuredly find fascinating. Their observations on all these topics will delight the reader, and, more to the point, give serious food for thought.