Critical Grief: walking the personal/public tightrope in the novels of Marion Halligan and Carol Shields

Abstract

Marion Halligan’s The Fog Garden1 and Carol Shield’s Unless2 are novels that foreground literary women’s experience of grief. They are the writers’ responses to extreme life crises. Marion Halligan writes following the death from cancer of her husband and life partner of thirty-five years. Carol Shields has also been immersed in a battle against cancer, one that she is losing. Grief has been the central focus of these women’s lives and they appear to be driven by a need to express their grief and outrage through their literature, a process they have managed in quite different ways.