Alice Munro

Canadian writer

• Born: July 10, 1931
• Place of Birth: Wingham, Ontario, Canada
• Died: May 13, 2024
• Place of Death: Ontario, Canada

Alice Munro, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the modern short story in English, won numerous awards over the course of her career, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Although typically set in small towns in southwestern Ontario, her fiction nevertheless transcends its provincial settings to reach an international audience with its insights into characters, their families, and their complex and difficult relationships.

Background

Alice Munro was raised on a farm a mile from the small town of Wingham, Ontario, the oldest of three children. She graduated from Wingham and District High School in 1949 and attended the University of Western Ontario for two years. She then married James Munro and moved with him to Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria, where they opened the store Munro’s Books. The couple had three daughters, Sheila (b. 1953), Jenny (b. 1957), and Andrea (b. 1966), but their marriage dissolved in the early 1970s. Munro moved to London, Ontario, in 1972 with her two younger daughters, became a writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario for a time, and in 1975 settled in Clinton, Ontario, about twenty miles from where she grew up in Wingham. She then married geographer Gerald Fremlin in 1976. The couple maintained residences in Clinton and Comox, British Columbia. Fremlin died in 2013 at the age of eighty-eight.

Life’s Work

Munro had written short stories all her life. She published her first in a college magazine in 1950 and sold her first, “A Basket of Strawberries,” in 1953 to Mayfair magazine. Her initial collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, and Other Stories, was not published until 1968, when it won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. After receiving this prestigious award, Munro published stories in leading magazines in Canada and the United States, including Ploughshares, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker, and gathered them into more than a dozen collections. In addition, she contributed stories to various anthologies of Canadian fiction, had pieces included in The Best American Short Stories and other annual collections of outstanding short fiction, and achieved numerous other signposts of literary recognition. Collections of Munro’s best work include Selected Stories (1996), Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (2006), and New Selected Stories (2011).

Munro’s writing revealed similar strengths throughout her career, but her stories also showed a clear evolution in scope and interest as she matured as a writer. Her earliest stories often focused on children growing up and coming of age in small towns. “An Ounce of Cure,” for example, collected in Dance of the Happy Shades, concerns a young girl’s first experience with teenage heartbreak and alcohol. “The Wild Swans” (1976), later collected in The Beggar Maid, tells of a young girl’s train ride to Toronto and her imagined encounter with adult perversion. The stories in her second collection, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), come closest to constituting a novel for Munro, as they all focus on the young life of Del Jordan, following her to the point where she will leave home. The pieces in The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose (1978), her second collection to win the Governor General’s Award, concern an imaginative young girl’s childhood struggles with her stepmother and her escape from the provincial town of Hanratty. The protagonist is not able to escape her past, however, as “Royal Beatings,” the first Munro story to be published in the New Yorker and a story often anthologized, so poignantly reveals.

In the stories of Munro’s middle period, from The Moons of Jupiter (1982) through The Progress of Love (1986), which also won the Governor General’s Award, to Open Secrets (1994), characters move out into their own lives and careers and then experience love and heartbreak, sickness and death. In the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, from The Love of a Good Woman (1998) to Runaway (2004), Munro continued to explore marriage, divorce, and old age. The characters in her later stories are rarely children or adolescents, and they experience a wider range of human life. In “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” for example (a story collected in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in 2001 and adapted into the 2007 film Away from Her), a couple married for half a century must struggle with the consequences of Alzheimer’s disease and the need to place the wife in a nursing home. In her 2006 collection The View from Castle Rock, Munro goes back into history to create earlier worlds known by her Scottish immigrant ancestors; in another set of stories in the collection, her sketches are more personal and autobiographical.

In all the stages of her career, Munro’s stories almost inevitably concerned human relationships, often revolved around the lives and difficulties of parents and children, and usually carried an undertone of the awareness of social class and class difference (The Beggar Maid was titled Who Do You Think You Are? when it was first published in Canada). The men in Munro’s literary worlds are vividly recalled, but the women provide the central focus in the bulk of her work. Her characters live through some of the most common and ordinary experiences imaginable, but these commonplaces are often imbued with a terrible significance. Even the titles of her collections of stories, from Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974) through Friend of My Youth (1990) to Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), convey this sense of ordinariness. They also include anything-but-ordinary human rituals and ceremonies, events repeated by their participants that also educate.

Munro’s writing style rarely calls attention to itself: Her first-person narrators use the language and voice of their social backgrounds, and even the third-person stories have a style that provides a clean window into the matter of the story. Her stories are often indeterminate and open-ended in their conclusions, yet critics find this incompleteness proof that Munro powerfully captures the mysteries of human life.

More than forty years after the publication of her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, Munro continued to write and publish new stories, collecting them in volumes such as Too Much Happiness (2009) and Dear Life (2012). The latter work won the Trillium Book Award, dedicated to the works of writers from Ontario; it was the third Munro collection to be honored with the award. After completing Dear Life, Munro stated that she was done writing stories. As a culmination of her literary career, a compilation of her later stories, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995–2014, was released in 2014.

Munro received numerous prestigious awards and honors throughout her career, including the Man Booker International Prize, the O. Henry Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award. In recognition of her many achievements, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, becoming the first Canadian citizen to receive the award as well as only the thirteenth woman to be awarded the honor since its creation in 1901. Canada has released a silver commemorative coin and a postage stamp in her honor, the former in 2014 and the latter in 2015.

Having experienced ongoing health issues for many years, Munro died in Port Hope, Ontario, at the age of ninety-two on May 13, 2024. She was predeceased by her daughter, Catherine, who died shortly after birth, and her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, who died in 2013. Her survivors included her daughters Sheila, Jenny, and Andrea, whom she had shared with her first husband, James Munro.

In July 2024, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed in a Toronto Star essay that Fremlin, her stepfather, had sexually abused and harassed her when she was a child. When she later revealed the abuse to her mother in 1992, Munro did not support her, but instead had treated the revelation as one of infidelity rather than child sexual abuse. Munro briefly left Fremlin, but returned and remained married to him until his death, even after Skinner brought her allegations to the Ontario police in 2005. Fremlin pleaded guilty to one charge of indecent assault against Skinner and received a suspended sentence and two-years probation.

Significance

Within the bounds of the short story form, Munro created literature that extends those bounds, yet remains tightly controlled and detailed. The smallest detail in a Munro story reverberates with significance and meaning. Like the Russian short-story writer Anton Chekhov or the Irish writer Frank O’Connor—writers with whom she is often ranked— she imbued the details of ordinary life in her stories with a great deal of weight without drawing obvious moral implications.

In many ways Munro was a regional writer, writing so often of Huron County, Ontario, Canada. However, like the best American regional writers, such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, who wrote on the American South, and Sherwood Anderson, who wrote on the American Midwest, Munro often linked the stories of “Munro country” through setting and character to create a fabric evoking the universal. In awarding Munro the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy recognized and praised her mastery of form, strong sense of place, and effective, minimalist writing style.

Munro's treatment of Skinner and failure to leave her second husband after learning of Fremlin's sexual abuse led to a prompted a reconsideration of her legacy among readers, publishers, editors, and the media. Indigo, Canada's largest bookseller chain, pulled images of Munro from its stores, although it continued to stock her works. Munro's alma mater, Western University, held off on filling a research chair named in her honor.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Sally. "Alice Munro's Daughter Has Made History." Toronto Star, 18 July 2024, www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/alice-munros-daughter-has-made-history/article‗d069f804-438a-11ef-96aa-e7ee97e60cef.html. Accessed 19 July 2024.

Blodgett, E. D. Alice Munro. Twayne, 1988.

Carrington, Ildiko de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. Northern Illinois UP, 1989.

Chong, Joshua. "Indigo Removing Alice Munro's Image from Bookstores over Daughter's Abuse Revelations." Toronto Star, 17 July 2024, www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/indigo-removing-alice-munro-s-image-from-bookstores-over-daughter-s-abuse-revelations/article‗fe0a1e30-4446-11ef-ab64-23ae7a7f0fcd.html. Accessed 19 July 2024.

DePalma, Anthony. "Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate and Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92." The New York Times, 14 May 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/books/alice-munro-dead.html. Accessed 15 May 2024.

Gibson, Douglas. Stories about Storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau, and Others. ECW, 2011.

Harris, Elizabeth A. "Weeks After Alice Munro’s Death, Daughter Tells of Dark Family Secret." The New York Times, 7 July 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/books/alice-munro-daughter-abuse.html. Accessed 19 July 2024.

Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. St. Martin’s, 1998.

Lee, Hermione. "Alice Munro's Magic." Rev. of Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995–2015, by Alice Munro. New York Review of Books, 5 Feb. 2015, www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/02/05/alice-munros-magic/. Accessed 19 July 2024.

May, Charles E., ed. Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Salem, 2012. Print.

Munro, Alice. "Alice Munro: In Her Own Words." Interview by Stefan Åsberg. The Nobel Prize, Nobel Media, 2013, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2013/munro/lecture/. Accessed 19 July 2024.

Munro, Alice. "Remember Roger Mortimer." New Yorker. Conde Nast, 25 Feb. 2015. Web. 14 Sept. 2015.

Munro, Sheila. Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro. McClelland, 2001.

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. ECW, 1992.

Schmunk, Rhianna. "Alice Munro, Canadian Author Who Mastered the Short Story, Dead at 92." CBC News, 14 May 2024, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/alice-munro-author-dead-obit-1.7203737. Accessed 19 July 2024.

Smith, Sarah A. "Alice Munro Obituary." The Guardian, 14 May 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/14/alice-munro-obituary. Accessed 19 July 2024.

Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives A Biography. Gibson, 2006.

Thacker, Robert, ed. The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro. Toronto: ECW, 1999. Print.

Zehelein, Eva-Sabine, ed. For (Dear) Life: Close Readings of Alice Munro's Ultimate Fiction. Zürich: LIT, 2014. Print.