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Alice Munro (1931-2014) |
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Canadian short story writer and novelist, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. Alice Munro was characterized as a Canadian Chekhov, though her characters are not Chekhovian in the sense that they were passive and powerless to change their lives. Munro describes sensitively the lifestyles, customs, and values of ordinary people, often revealing in the process hidden meanings and personal tragedies. Many of her stories deal with the lives of women, but her stance is not explicitly feminist. "The street is shaded, is some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards. People are sitting out, men in shirt-sleeves and undershirts and women in aprons - not people we know but if anybody looks ready to nod and say, "Warm night," my father will nod and say something the same." (from 'Walker Brothers Cowboy,' in Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968, p. 1) Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario, where
she
grew up on a farm with her sister and brother. Her ancestors – the
Scots Presbyterian Laidlaws and the Irish Anglican Chamneys – had
arrived in Upper Canada after the end of the Napoleonic wars.
Among the Laidlaw relatives left behind in Scotland was the poet and
prose writer James Hogg (1770-1835), a friend of Byron, Wordsworth, and
Southey. Before taking up farming, Munro's father, Robert Eric Laidlaw,
had raised foxes and minks and worked as a watch-man. Anne Clarke
Laidlaw (née Chamney), Munro's mother, had been a teacher. She suffered
from Parkinson's disease and died in 1959. Robert Laidlaw died in 1976; his novel The McGregors: a Novel of an Ontaria Pioneer Family, came out posthumously. Munro was expected to continue the farming business, but when
she
was 12, she decided to become a writer – "my oddity just shone out
of me," she once said. Munro read Lucy Maud Montgomery for the first time when she was nine or then years old; especially Emily of the New Moon (1923) had a strong emotional effect on her. In her early teens, she found Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). "I think I probably read it thereafter constantly for four or five years. I was really reading it all the time." (The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines, 2016, p. 11) At school Munro was a good student. She attended Lower Town School Wingham (1937-9), Wingham Public School (1939-44), and Wingham and District High School, graduating in 1949. After winning a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, she first studied journalism, and then changed her major to English. In 1951 she married a fellow student, James Munro, and settled with him in Vancouver, British Columbia. In the early 1960s, the family moved to Victoria, where Munro founded with her husband a successful bookstore. "I never intended to be a short-story writer," Munro once said. 'The Dimensions of a Shadow' (1950), Munro's first story, came out in the April 1950 issue of Folio, the university's undergraduate literary magazine. The CBSB bought and broadcast 'The Strangers' in October 1951. Her early fiction appeared in such magazines as Mayfair, the Canadian Forum, Queen's Quarterly, Chatelaine, and the Tamarack Review, but it was not until 1968, when her stories were collected in book form and published under the title Dance of the Happy Shades by Ryerson Press. The book was awarded Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award. Several of the stories drew on Munro's own childhood experience. "The short story is alive and well in Canada," said the writer and critic Martin Levin, "where most of the 15 tales originate like a fresh winds from the North." (The New York Times, September 23, 1973) Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel (1971),
Munro's second book, was a
cycle of interlocked stories about the childhood of a young woman, Del
Jordan, who is beginning her journey into literature. To write the
book, dedicated to Jim, Munro converted her laundry room into a place
of her own, in which she could work undisturbed. The portrait of the artist as a young girl
gained international attention and was also made in 1996 into a
television
movie, starring Tanya Allen. Munro's daughter Sheila has recognized
much of herself in the character of Del Jordan. In her book of memoir, Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro
(2001), she said: "So much of what I think I know . . . is
refracted through the prism of her writing. So unassailable is the
truth of her fiction that sometimes I feel as though I'm living inside
an Alice Munro story." (Ibid., p. 11) Munro
marriage broke down in 1972. She returned to southern
Ontario,
and married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer, whom she had known as a
student. They moved into a white frame house, with
nasturtiums, raspberry canes, a birdbath, and trees in the backyard.
Munro's youngest daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed in essay
published in the Toronto Star
on July 7, 2024, that her stepfather sexually assaulted her when she
was nine years old. Munro learned of the abuse years later but she
stayed with Fremlin until he died in 2013. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You from 1974 collected together pieces published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Viva and Redbook. The author was first unhappy with the book, and pulled it from the presses for restructuring. In Britain it was published as a novel. Munro's third collection, however, contains some of her finest stories, including 'Wild Swans,' 'Mischief,' and 'Simon's Luck.' Also in Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), which followed the lives of two women, Rose and Flo, her stepmother, the tales were interlinked. Rose leaves the small town of Hanratty in Ontario, marries well, and becomes a successful television actress, but eventually she returns to take care of Flo, who has always been comfortable with her place in the world. From
the beginning, Munro was true to her own literary
style
and voice. The prose is down to earth, but though on a surface
level Munro relays on reality-based facts, and draws bits of her
stories from
experiences of her own or others, her writing has the depth of
psychoanalytic understanding of the mind: defence mechanisms prevent
her charcters from having an accurate perception of the world,
traumatic experiences affect thoughts and behavior patterns,dreams
reveal hidden truths. As the narrative unfolds, the seemingly ordinary
characters turn out to be quite different than expected. "Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best
fiction writer now working in North America," said Jonathan Franzen in
his review of Munro's Runaway
(2004), "but outside Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers,
she has never had a large readership." ('Runaway': Alice's Wonderland,' The New York Times, 14.11.2004) Generally Munro's stories are set
in small towns in southern
Ontario and British Columbia. It is the landscape she loved and had
meaning to her, but for a long time her home town had a predominantly
negative attitude towards her literary vocation. The local newspaper Wingham Advance Times published
an editorial calling her a "warped personality." (The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines, 2016, p. 8) Along with Munro's
growing success criticism changed into appreciation, and in 2002 the
town opened the Alice Munro Literary Garden. Munro's style has been described as beautifully transparent; it is unsentimental and detailed as in a photograph, much is left unsaid, but at the same time the undercurrents are oddly poignant and disturbing. The past is always present in the here and now. "The complexity of things—the things within things—just seems to be endless," Munro has said in an interview. "I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple." ('Go Ask Alice,' The New Yorker, February 11, 2001) As a rule, Munro's characters are people we meet every day, but their choices are not obvious. Sometimes a small incident changes the course of their lives, gives it a new perspective, or provides a key piece to the story. Munro received the
Governor General's Award for Fiction three times. The short film
adaptation of her story 'Boys and Girls' won an Oscar in 1984. In 1990 Munro was awarded the Canada Council Molson Prize for lifetime
contributions to her country's cultural life. In 2009, she won the
£60,000 Man Booker International prize. After winning the Trillium Book
Award (2013), Munro told in an interview that she's probably not going
to write anymore. She suffered from dementia during the last period of her life. Alice Munro died at her home in Port Hope on 13 May 2024. She was 92. For further reading: Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, ed. by Louis K. Mackendrick ( 1981); Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro by Ildiko De Papp Carrington (1989); Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro by Beverly Rasporich (1990); Alice Munro: A Double Life by Catherine Ross (1992); The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence by Ajay Heble (1994); The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers by John Cooke (1996); Alice Munro by Coral Ann Howells (1998); The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro, ed. by Robert Thacker (1999); Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up With Alice Munro by Sheila Munro (2001); Reading in: Alice Munro's Archives by Joann McCaig (2002); Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography by Robert Thacker (2005); Alice Munro's Narrative Art by Isla Duncan (2011); Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013 by Robert Thacker (2016); The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines (2016); Alice Munro Everlasting: Essays on Her Works I-II, edited by J.R. (Tim) Struthers (2020); New Realism in Alice Munro's Fiction by Li-Ping Geng (2022) Selected works:
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