By Susan Billingham Canadian Studies lecturer, Nottingham University

Shields achieved international acclaim for The Stone Diaries, the story of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a novel with one chapter for each decade of the 20th Century.

Shields wrote about the lives of ordinary people

Large events like the two world wars and the depression remain on the periphery; instead, Shields turns her attention to the domestic.

From her unexpected birth to an innocent mother seemingly unaware she was pregnant, to her death aged over 90 hooked up to machines in a hospital, Daisy's story is the story of an unremarkable middle-class woman living through a century of uncertainty and change.

While Shields's writing is generally realist in tone, she flirts with post-modern techniques also, with the problem of telling stories.

The Stone Diaries includes photographs that seem to bear no resemblance to the descriptions in the text, and there are many gaps in the story that can never be filled.

The novel illuminates "the deep, shared common distress of men and women, and how little they are allowed, finally, to say".

Shields was a warm and witty writer

Shields will be remembered for the clarity and honesty of her writing.

Her greatest skill was to write about the everyday lives of ordinary people - and make them seem extraordinary.

In the words of one of her early titles, she celebrates "small ceremonies".

She illuminates the brief moments of time that often go unnoticed, but which added together make up the substance of our lives.

Shields was fascinated by the connections that arise from coincidence, accident, or chance collisions.

Her stories repeatedly return to those moments when people sense a link between themselves and others or themselves and the world, and the resulting feelings of happiness or renewal - the little events that bind us together.

Yet at the same time, she recognised the "lifelong interior monologue that occupies and imprisons the self", the way we spend much of our lives in the private cave of our own minds.

Despite these serious topics, Shields is a deceptively witty writer. Like many Canadian writers, she has the gift of irony and the ability to poke fun at herself.