Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields. No need to beat around the bush. There aren’t any surprises here, except perhaps that Margaret Laurence should have made the list (The Stone Angel is often referred to as one of the great novels of Canadian literature). If this list seems obvious, here’s a question (or two): Have you read the notable works by all three great dames? Have you ever attempted one of Munro’s masterful short story collections?

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s works have been translated into more than 40 languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. Though best known for her novels, Atwood has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, 9 works of non-fiction (including Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth), and 6 books of children’s literature, not to mention the anthologies she has edited, the television scripts she’s worked on and the librettos (the librettos?!). She’s won the Governor General’s Award twice, won the Booker in 2000, and has been awarded honorary degrees by no less than 16 universities, including University of Toronto and Harvard.

It is probably undeniable that the book that put Atwood on the map internationally was A Handsmaid’s Tale. Its Booker nomination and the fact that it was made into a movie didn’t hurt, nor did Atwood’s unique ability to tell a dystopian story that many would classify as science fiction (if ever there were a genre dominated by male writers), and yet write with the high art, whip-smart perception and commentary of the literary artist—one who happened to be writing about, amongst other things, women and their rights.

Fourteen years later, and with two more novels short-listed for the illustrious award, The Blind Assassin finally won the author the coveted Booker Prize. Neither a short nor a particularly easy novel, it is highly ambitious and filled to the brim with literary technique and wizardry of every kind—at once a work of science fiction, a supposed memoir, and for some chapters, a novel within a novel. Best of all, though, this complex novel, which is at its core is a love story, is never boring.

For many Atwood fans, and those less inclined toward her more science fiction-like books, the novel that often stands above the rest is Cat’s Eye. Atwood here casts her fiercely perceptive, unrelenting gaze on the lives of girls, girls about to become women, girls and how they can be mean to each other. It is a story of bullying, it is a story of memory. It is also one of the most complex and revealing tales of those trying pre-teen years.

Alice Munro

Cynthia Ozick described Alice Munro as “our Chekhov.” Ozick’s not the only writer or critic to compare Munro to the most famous short story writer of them all. When Alice Munro writes a story, it seems the New Yorker is waiting, eagerly, to publish it. For her vast body of work, she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2009. She has been awarded the Governor General’s award for fiction thrice and it seems only a matter of time before the Nobel committee comes a-knocking.

When a writer’s work gets vaunted to such a degree this can often, paradoxically, elicit a fear in readers that the material will be too dense or difficult to enjoy. You need only read one or two Munro stories, however, to see how clear and penetrating they are. Usually set in quiet Southwestern Ontario towns, her stories are never opaque or obscure; they are never hard to understand. They can border on the seemingly uneventful or mundane when they start. Where they take the reader, however—and this is part of Munro’s genius—is always unexpected. The pretty pastoral visions that might begin these stories are artfully scratched away as Munro shows the more complex and often darker side of humanity.

With some 17 collections of short stories, many award winners and nominees—including Giller-winning collections The Love of a Good Woman (1998) and Runaway (2004)—where, if not with those two books, does one start? A safe bet would be the collection Munro herself selected of her favourite works, entitled My Best Stories (Margaret Atwood wrote the glowing introduction).

For those readers who just can’t get into short stories and simply prefer novels, a good choice would be Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women, the author’s only published novel. A book strong enough, perhaps, to convince a few readers to give the legendary short stories a try.

Carol Shields

Some artists, Van Gogh for instance, produce their best work in the last years of their lives. Carol Shields was such an artist, producing three of her most famous novels in the last ten years of her life. Shields was only 68 when she died of breast cancer in 2003. Just ten years earlier she produced what many consider her masterpiece. The Stone Diaries is the only book in history to win both the Canadian Governor General’s prize as well as the American Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the same year. Over the next nine years she would go on to win the illustrious Orange Prize for Larry’s Party, and in 2002—the year before her passing—her last novel, fan favourite Unless, was short-listed for the Giller and the Booker.

Written in a diary format, The Stone Diaries is the story of Daisy Goodwill, from her childhood all the way through to old age. It is a book about a life at the same time as it is a book about the limits of autobiography. As the glowing review in the New York Times read on March 27^th, 1994: “Her words ring like stones in a brook, chilled and perfected; the syntax rushes like water, tumbling with the slight forward tilt that makes for narrative. The reader is caught in whirlpools and eddies, swirled, then launched farther downstream.”

Just as all of Alice Munro’s accolades might scare readers into thinking they just won’t “get her,” there is also the fear, with a more accessible writer like Carol Shields, that her accolades will spell boredom for the reader. For reassurance, here is the premise to Shields’ last book, Unless, which centers around Reta Winters, a woman “in the spring of her forty-forth year” with seemingly nothing to worry about until “her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck.” Not exactly ho-hum material, now is it?

Sorry, Boys

Canada can claim Mordecai Richler and W.P. Kinsella; it has Alistair Macleod and Douglas Coupland, but the fact of it is some of our truly greatest literary exports are women, and Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields are just three at (or near) the very top of a rather lengthy list.

Next up: The New Guard: Three Great New(er) Canadian Female Writers