Alice Munro

Alice Munro
File:Alice Munro 2006 (cropped).jpg Munro in 2006
Born	Alice Ann Laidlaw (1931-07-10)10 July 1931 Wingham, Ontario, Canada
Died	Port Hope, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Short story writer
Language	English
Education	University of Western Ontario
Genre	Short fiction short story cycle literary fiction
Notable awards	Governor General's Award (1968, 1978, 1986) Giller Prize (1998, 2004) Man Booker International Prize (2009) Nobel Prize in Literature (2013)
Spouse	James Munro (m. 1951; div. 1972) Gerald Fremlin (m. 1976; d. 2013)
Children	4

Alice Ann Munro (/mənˈroʊ/; née Laidlaw /ˈleɪdlɔː/; 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short fiction cycles.

Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in a simple prose style.

Munro received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her body of work. She was also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway. She mostly stopped writing around 2013 and died at her home in 2024.

In July 2024, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published an essay in The Toronto Star in which she wrote that Munro's second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her in 1976 when she was nine years old, and that Munro stayed with him after Skinner told her about the abuse in 1992. Literary figures are reassessing her legacy.

Early life

Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and later turned to turkey farming. Her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. She was of Irish and Scottish descent; her father was a descendant of Scottish poet James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.

Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James' job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.

She had three children with James Munro (one died shortly after birth), and when the children were still young she would attempt to write whenever she could; her husband encouraged her by sending her into the book shop while he looked after the children and cooked. In 1961, after she had had a few stories published in small magazines, the Vancouver Sun ran a brief article on her, titled "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories", and called her the "least praised good writer". She found it difficult, even with her husband's help, to find the time among "the pile up of unavoidable household jobs" to write, and found it easier to concentrate on short stories, rather than the novels her publisher wanted her to write.

Career

Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, then Canada's highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories. In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published. This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980 under its international title, The Beggar Maid.

From 1979 to 1982, Munro toured Australia, China and Scandinavia for public appearances and readings. In 1980, she held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland.

From the 1980s to 2012, Munro published a short story collection at least once every four years. First versions of Munro's stories appeared in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Harper's Magazine, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, and The Paris Review. Her collections have been translated into 13 languages. In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a "master of the contemporary short story". She was the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Munro had a longtime association with editor and publisher Douglas Gibson. When Gibson left Macmillan of Canada in 1986 to launch the Douglas Gibson Books imprint at McClelland and Stewart, Munro returned the advance Macmillan had paid her for The Progress of Love so that she could follow Gibson to the new company. When Gibson published his memoirs in 2011, Munro wrote the introduction, and Gibson often made public appearances on Munro's behalf when her health prevented her from appearing personally.

Almost 20 of Munro's works have been made available for free on the web, in most cases only the first versions. From the period before 2003, 16 stories have been included in Munro's own compilations more than twice, with two of her works scoring four republications: "Carried Away" and "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage".

Film adaptations of Munro's short stories include Martha, Ruth and Edie (1988), Edge of Madness (2002), Away from Her (2006), Hateship, Loveship (2013) and Julieta (2016).

Writing

Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Strong regional focus is one of her fiction's features. Asked after she won the Nobel Prize, "What can be so interesting in describing small town Canadian life?", she replied: "You just have to be there." Another feature is an omniscient narrator. Many compare her small-town settings to writers from the rural American South. Her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. Much of her work exemplifies the Southern Ontario Gothic literary subgenre.

A frequent theme of her work, especially her early stories, is the girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and small hometown. In work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, women alone, and the elderly. Munro's stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Her prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time", "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry", "special, useless knowledge", "tones of shrill and happy outrage", "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it". Her style juxtaposes the fantastic and the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly evoke life. Robert Thacker wrote:

Munro's writing creates ... an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude—not of mimesis, so-called and ... "realism"—but rather the feeling of being itself ... of just being a human being.

Many critics have written that Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels. Some have asked whether Munro actually writes short stories or novels. Alex Keegan, writing in Eclectica, answered: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."

The first PhD thesis on Munro's work was published in 1972. The first book-length volume collecting the papers presented at the University of Waterloo's first conference on her work, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, was published in 1984. In 2003/2004, the journal Open Letter. Canadian quarterly review of writing and sources published 14 contributions on Munro's work. In 2010, the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)/Les cahiers de la nouvelle dedicated a special issue to Munro, and in 2012, an issue of the journal Narrative focused on a single story by Munro, "Passion" (2004), with an introduction, summary of the story, and five analytical essays.

Creating new versions

Munro published variant versions of her stories, sometimes within a short span of time. Her stories "Save the Reaper" and "Passion" came out in two different versions in the same year, in 1998 and 2004 respectively. Two other stories were republished in a variant versions about 30 years apart, "Home" (1974/2006/2014) and "Wood" (1980/2009).

In 2006, Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano reported that Munro had not wanted to reread the galleys of Runaway (2004): "No, because I'll rewrite the stories." In their symposium contribution An Appreciation of Alice Munro, they say that Munro wrote eight versions of her story "Powers", for example.

Awano writes that "Wood" is a good example of how Munro, "a tireless self-editor", rewrites and revises a story, in this case returning to it for a second publication nearly 30 years later, revising characterizations, themes, and perspectives, as well as rhythmic syllables, a conjunction or a punctuation mark. The characters change, too. Inferring from the perspective they take on things, they are middle-aged in 1980, and older in 2009. Awano perceives a heightened lyricism brought about not least by the poetic precision of Munro's revision. The 2009 version has eight sections to the 1980 version's three, and a new ending. Awano writes that Munro literally "refinishes" the first take on the story with an ambiguity characteristic of her endings, and reimagines her stories throughout her work in various ways.

Personal life

Munro married James Munro in 1951. Their daughters Sheila, Catherine, and Jenny were born in 1953, 1955, and 1957, respectively; Catherine died the day of her birth due to a kidney dysfunction. In September 1966, her youngest daughter, Andrea Sarah, was born.

In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, a popular bookstore that remains in business. Alice and James Munro divorced in 1972.

Munro returned to Ontario to become writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario, and in 1976 received an honorary LLD from the institution. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer she met during her university days. The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton, where Fremlin died on 17 April 2013, aged 88. Munro and Fremlin also owned a home in Comox, British Columbia.

In 2009, Munro revealed that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiring coronary artery bypass surgery.

In 2002, Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro.

Death

Munro died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, on 13 May 2024, at age 92. She had dementia for at least 12 years.

Sexual abuse complicity allegations

In 2024, shortly after Munro's death, her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed publicly that Fremlin had sexually abused her in 1976 when she was nine years old and that she told Munro about the incident in 1992, when she was 25. Skinner also disclosed that Fremlin repeatedly exposed himself to her, masturbated in front of her, and made sexually explicit statements to her until her adolescence. Other family members, including Skinner's father, stepmother, stepbrother, and sisters had known about the abuse since 1976, the year it took place, but the family kept it a secret from Munro for 16 years. After finding out from Skinner, Munro separated from Fremlin for a few months but ultimately went back to him. Munro told Skinner that she had been "told too late". Munro's daughter Sheila said that "Alice wasn’t able to sustain being alone and being apart from him. She told me that she couldn’t live without him." In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence and probation.

According to a letter excerpted in the Toronto Star, Fremlin wrote of the nine-year-old victim: "It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure." Skinner reports that she and Munro became estranged decades later when, while pregnant, she told Munro that Fremlin could not be around her children, and "then she just coldly told me that it was going to be a terrible inconvenience for her (because she didn't drive)." According to Skinner, her mother "chose to stay with and protect my abuser". The management of Munro's Books, which no longer has ties to the Munro family since Jim Munro's retirement in 2014, issued a statement of support for Skinner.

Author Margaret Atwood, a friend of Munro, explained Munro's decision to stay with Fremlin after learning of his molestation by saying that Munro "wasn't very adept at real (practical) life. She wasn't very interested in cooking or gardening or any of that." Time Magazine reported that Munro's biographer Robert Thacker was aware of the allegations, but elected not to include them in his book, deeming them private. Similarly the Washington Post reported that Douglas Gibson, Munro's long-time editor and publisher, "was aware that Alice and Andrea were estranged for a number of years” and that in 2005 it became clear to him "what the issue was, with Gerry Fremlin’s full shameful role revealed".

Legacy

Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and with integrated short fiction cycles, in which she displayed "inarguable virtuosity". Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade". Munro was seen as a pioneer in short story telling, with the Swedish Academy calling her a "master of the contemporary short story" who could "accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages". In her New York Times obituary, Munro's works were credited for "attracting a new generation of readers" and she was called a "master of the short story". Her work is often compared with that of the most critically acclaimed short story writers. In it, as in Anton Chekhov's, plot is secondary and little happens.

Her works and career have been ranked alongside other well-established short story writers such as Anton Chekhov and John Cheever. As in Chekhov, Garan Holcombe writes: "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Her work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekhov's obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward."

Munro's work has been considered a "national treasure" of Canada as it focuses largely on life in rural Canada from the perspective of womanhood. Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood has called Munro a "pioneer for women, and for Canadians". The Associated Press said that Munro "perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away."

Sherry Linkon, professor at Georgetown University, said that Munro's works "helped remodel and revitalize the short-story form". The complexity of the themes explored in her work, such as womanhood, death, relationships, aging, and themes associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, were seen as groundbreaking, especially since they were able to be captured in short story form.

Upon winning the Man Booker International Prize, her works were described by judges of the committee as bringing "as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels".

Immediately after the news of the sexual abuse of Munro's daughter emerged, Munro's Books management issued a statement that reads in part, "Along with so many readers and writers, we will need time to absorb this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and ties to the store we have previously celebrated."

Works

Main article: List of short stories by Alice Munro

Original short story collections

• Dance of the Happy Shades – 1968 (winner of the 1968 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
• Lives of Girls and Women – 1971 (winner of the Canadian Bookseller's Award)
• Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You – 1974
• Who Do You Think You Are? – 1978 (winner of the 1978 Governor General's Award for Fiction; also published as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose; short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980)
• The Moons of Jupiter – 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
• The Progress of Love – 1986 (winner of the 1986 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
• Friend of My Youth – 1990 (winner of the Trillium Book Award)
• Open Secrets – 1994 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
• The Love of a Good Woman – 1998 (winner of the 1998 Giller Prize and the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award)
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – 2001 (republished as Away from Her)
• Runaway – 2004 (winner of the Giller Prize and Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize)
• The View from Castle Rock – 2006
• Too Much Happiness – 2009
• Dear Life – 2012

Short story compilations

• Selected Stories (later retitled Selected Stories 1968–1994 and A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968–1994) – 1996
• No Love Lost – 2003
• Vintage Munro – 2004
• Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories – Toronto 2006 / Carried Away: A Selection of Stories – New York 2006; both 17 stories (spanning 1977–2004) with an introduction by Margaret Atwood
• My Best Stories – 2009
• New Selected Stories – 2011
• Lying Under the Apple Tree. New Selected Stories – 2014
• Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995–2014 – 2014

Selected awards and honours

Awards

• Governor General's Literary Award for English language fiction (1968, 1978, 1986)
• Canadian Booksellers Award for Lives of Girls and women (1971)
• Canada-Australia Literary Prize, inaugural prize (1977)
• Shortlisted for the annual (UK) Booker Prize for Fiction (1980) for The Beggar Maid
• The Writers' Trust of Canada's Marian Engel Award (1986) for her body of work
• Trillium Book Award for Friend of My Youth (1991), The Love of a Good Woman (1999) and Dear Life (2013)
• WH Smith Literary Award (1995, UK) for Open Secrets
• Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1995)
• PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1997)
• National Book Critics Circle Award (1998, U.S.) For The Love of a Good Woman
• Giller Prize (1998 and 2004)
• Rea Award for the Short Story (2001) given to a living American or Canadian author
• Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (2004) for Runaway
• Libris Award, 1999 Author of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year (The Love of a Good Woman)
• Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony (2006).
• O. Henry Award for continuing achievement in short fiction in the U.S. for "Passion" (2006), "What Do You Want To Know For" (2008) and "Corrie" (2012)
• Man Booker International Prize (2009, UK)
• Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book Award for Canada and the Caribbean Region shortlisted (1991, 2002, 2005, 2007)
• Nobel Prize in Literature (2013) as a "master of the contemporary short story".

Honours

• 1993: Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal
• 1997: Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2005: Medal of Honor for Literature from the U.S. National Arts Club
• 2010: Government of France – Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters
• 2014: Silver coin released by the Royal Canadian Mint in honour of Munro's Nobel Prize win
• 2015: Postage stamp released by Canada Post in honour of Munro's Nobel Prize win

Further reading

• Atwood, Margaret et al. "Appreciations of Alice Munro." Archived 23 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine Virginia Quarterly Review 82.3 (Summer 2006): 91–107. Interviews with various authors (Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Michael Cunningham, Charles McGrath, Daniel Menaker and others) presented in first-person essay format
• Awano, Lisa Dickler. "Kindling The Creative Fire: Alice Munro's Two Versions of 'Wood.'" Archived 29 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine New Haven Review (30 May 2012). Examining overall themes in Alice Munro's fiction through a study of her two versions of "Wood."
• Awano, Lisa Dickler. "Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness." Virginia Quarterly Review (22 October 2010). Long-form book review of Too Much Happiness in the context of Alice Munro's canon.
• Dolnick, Ben. "A Beginner's Guide to Alice Munro" Archived 12 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine The Millions (5 July 2012)
• Gibson, Douglas. Stories About Storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau, and Others. (ECW Press, 2011.) Excerpt.
• Hooper, Brad The Fiction of Alice Munro: An Appreciation (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008), ISBN 978-0-275-99121-0
• Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), ISBN 978-0-7190-4558-5
• Lorre-Johnston,Christine, and Eleonora Rao, eds. Space and Place in Alice Munro's Fiction: "A Book with Maps in It." Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018.ISBN 978-1-64014-020-2[1].
• Mazur, Carol and Moulder, Cathy. Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. (Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0-8108-5924-1
• Murray, Jennifer. Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan Archived 8 April 2019 at the Wayback Machine. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016)
• Simpson, Mona. A Quiet Genius Archived 24 December 2011 at the Wayback Machine The Atlantic. (December 2001)
• Somacarrera, Pilar. A Spanish Passion for the Canadian Short Story: Reader Responses to Alice Munro's Fiction in Web 2.0 Archived 23 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine Open Access, in: Made in Canada, Read in Spain: Essays on the Translation and Circulation of English-Canadian Literature Archived 23 October 2014 at the Wayback Machine Open Access, edited by Pilar Somacarrera, de Gruyter, Berlin 2013, p. 129–144, ISBN 978-83-7656-017-5
• Tausky, Thomas E. Biocritical Essay. Archived 27 March 2014 at the Wayback Machine The University of Calgary Library Special Collections (1986)

External links

• List of Works
• Alice Munro at the Internet Movie Database
• Alice Munro collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• "Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137", The Paris Review No. 131, Summer 1994
• Alice Munro at the British Council Writers Directory
• Stories by Alice Munro accessible online
• Alice Munro's papers (fonds) held at the University of Calgary
• How To Tell If You Are in an Alice Munro Story, 8 December 2014
• [[Category:Nobel Prize in {{{1}}} winners]] with a pre-recorded video conversation with the Laureate Alice Munro: In Her Own Words