In The Stone Diaries (1993), Carol Shields interrogates the conventions of autobiography and its ability to represent the life of an ordinary woman. A striking feature of the text is its sudden and sometimes disconcerting shifts in narrative voice from first to third. From this evidence, it seems that it is Judith Downing, Daisy Goodwill’s eldest granddaughter, who writes Daisy’s life story, in collaboration with various family members,. This reading of the narrative as an apocryphal history, or “apocryphal journal” (Stone 118), is supported by archival evidence, by Shields’s own commentary, and by textual analysis. Influenced by postmodernist revisionist critiques of historiography and taking the form of a meta-autobiography, The Stone Diaries presents a sophisticated and complex feminist critique of dominant discourses such as autobiography, and it anticipates recent theoretical directions in women’s life writing and autobiography studies.