When Carol Shields published her first novel, Small Ceremonies, in 1976, her local newspaper in Canada ran a story under the headline: “Housewife Writes Novel”. “Can you imagine?” she would exclaim when telling this story, shaking her head in disbelief, but laughing at the same time.

Although the book went on to win the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for the best novel of the year, it took some time before Shields’s work was generally appreciated. Three further novels and a volume of short stories followed, but it was not until her fifth novel, Swann: A Mystery, was published in Britain in 1990 as Mary Swann that Shields was recognised as a writer of international standing.

The novel had been turned down repeatedly in Britain, but Christopher Potter at Fourth Estate knew he wanted to publish it after reading the first page. Critics and readers were delighted to be introduced to this “new” voice, and Fourth Estate began publishing Shields’s earlier work.

Her subsequent books fully justified this act of faith: The Stone Diaries was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and went on to win the Governor General’s Award in Canada and the National Critics’ Circle Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in America; Larry’s Party won the Orange Prize in 1998. (Unusually, Shields was eligible for both Booker and Pulitzer Prizes because she had dual citizenship of Canada and the US.)

She was born Carol Warner in 1935 in Oak Park, Illinois, which she described as “an extremely Wasp suburb of Chicago”. Her father was manager of a confectionary company and her mother was a teacher. After the local high school, she went to Hanover College, Indiana, where she majored in English.

During a year as an exchange student at Exeter University she met Donald Shields, a civil engineer from Saskatchewan, who was on a graduate fellowship. They married as soon as she graduated in 1957, living in Vancouver and then Toronto, where their first two children were born. They spent three further years in England, from 1960 to 1963, while her husband worked on a doctorate at Manchester University, and they had three more children. Carol Shields became a Canadian citizen in 1971, partly so that she could vote for the socialist NDP in the general election, and she remained, as she put it, “an old lefty”.

She had been interested in writing from childhood, and while living in Toronto attended a course on writing for magazines at the university. She did not find the classes particularly useful, but her tutor sent one of her stories to CBC, where it was accepted for broadcast. In between bringing up her children, she wrote more stories — and started writing poetry after reading Philip Larkin. She won the poetry prize in the CBC Young Writers Competition in 1965, and her first two books were volumes of poems: Others (1972) and Intersect (1974).

The family moved to Ottawa in 1968 when her husband took a job at the university there. This entitled Shields to free tuition, so she enrolled for an MA in Canadian literature and wrote her thesis on the 19th-century writer Susanna Moodie, the basis of her book Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision (1975).

After the publication of her second novel, The Box Garden, in 1977, she spent a year teaching creative writing at the University of Ottawa. She taught a similar course at the University of British Columbia before settling in Winnipeg in 1980. A long-serving professor of English at the University of Manitoba, she also became Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1999, the year that the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award was founded in her honour. She and her husband retired from academic life in 2000 to a large and beautiful house in Victoria, British Columbia.

Shields said that once she had written one novel, the rest followed naturally. Without really planning to, she had become a novelist. She started by writing the kind of books that she herself wanted to read, and her first four novels were domestic in scale and, she felt, “quite traditional”. They were, however, quizzically ironic, acutely observant and very well written, repeatedly providing what one of her characters described as “the unexpected consolation of the right word perfectly used”. She evolved a prose style that illuminated ordinary lives without ever appearing forced or self-conscious.

She also became “interested in different structures, different ways of telling stories”. Her third and fourth novels, Happenstance (1980) and A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982), tell the same story from the points of view of a husband and wife respectively; they were published in Britain head-to-toe in a single volume, leaving it up to the reader which version to read first: “The Husband’s Story” or “The Wife’s Story”.

Mary Swann has four different narrators, each of whom has a vested interest in the life and work of the eponymous poet and can not therefore be relied upon. The final section of the book, in which these characters take part in a symposium, is written in the form of a film script. “I had a sudden sense I could do anything I wanted in the novel form,” Shields said. “It’s enormously elastic and commodious.” The Stone Diaries includes recipes, lists, family trees and even a section of photographs — supposedly of the characters but in fact a mixture of family snaps and junk-shop discoveries.

Her final novel, Unless, is as much concerned with language — in particular those “little chips of grammar” that qualify information and provide titles for the book and each of its chapters — as it is with goodness and loss.