Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw inWingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer,[1] and later turned to turkey farming.[2] Her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. She was of Irish and Scottish descent; her father was a descendant of Scottish poetJames Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.[3]
Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950 while studying English and journalism at theUniversity of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship.[4][5] During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk.[6][7] In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949,[6] to marry fellow student James Munro.[8] They moved toDundarave, West Vancouver, for James' job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved toVictoria, where they openedMunro's Books, which still operates.[9]
She had four children with James Munro (one died shortly after birth),[10] 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.[11] In 1961, after she had had a few stories published insmall magazines, theVancouver Sun ran a brief article on her, titled "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories", and called her the "least praised good writer".[12] 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.[13][14]
Munro had a longtime association with editor and publisherDouglas Gibson.[25] When Gibson leftMacmillan of Canada in 1986 to launch theDouglas Gibson Books imprint atMcClelland & Stewart, Munro returned the advance Macmillan had paid her forThe Progress of Love so that she could follow Gibson to the new company.[26] 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.[27]
Almost 20 of Munro's works have been made available for free on the web, in most cases only the first versions.[28][circular reference] 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".(For further details, seeList of short stories by Alice Munro.)
Many of Munro's stories are set inHuron County, Ontario.[31] 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."[32] Another feature is an omniscient narrator. Many compare her small-town settings to those of writers from therural American South. Her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. Much of her work exemplifies theSouthern Ontario Gothic literary subgenre.[33]
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.[29] In work such asHateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) andRunaway (2004), she shifted her focus to the travails of middle-aged women alone, and the elderly.[30] Munro's stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.[34] 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 and effortlessly evoke life.[35] 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 ofmimesis, so-called and ... "realism"—but rather the feeling of being itself ... of just being a human being.[36]
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 inEclectica Magazine, answered: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."[37]
The firstPhD thesis on Munro's work was published in 1972.[38] The first book-length volume collecting the papers presented at theUniversity of Waterloo's first conference on her work,The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, was published in 1984.[39] In 2003/2004, the journalOpen Letter. The Canadian Quarterly Review of writing and sources published 14 contributions on Munro's work. In 2010, theJournal 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 journalNarrative focused on a single story by Munro, "Passion" (2004), with an introduction, summary of the story, and five analytical essays.[39]
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 version about 30 years apart, "Home" (1974/2006/2014) and "Wood" (1980/2009).(For details, seeList of short stories by Alice Munro § Short stories by title (sortable).)
In 2006, Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano reported that Munro had not wanted to reread the galleys ofRunaway (2004): "No, because I'll rewrite the stories." In their symposium contributionAn Appreciation of Alice Munro, they say that Munro wrote eight versions of her story "Powers", for example.[40]
Awano writes that "Wood" is a good example of how Munro, "a tireless self-editor",[41] rewrites and revises a story, in this case returning to it for a second publication nearly 30 years later, revising characterisations, 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.[41] 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.[41]
Munro married James Munro in 1951.[29] 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.[42] In September 1966, their youngest daughter, Andrea Robin, was born.[29]
In 1963, the Munros moved toVictoria, where they openedMunro's Books, a popular bookstore that remains in business.[29] Alice and James Munro divorced in 1972.[29]
Munro returned to Ontario to become writer in residence at theUniversity of Western Ontario, and in 1976, received an honoraryLLD from the institution. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer she met during her university days.[4] The couple moved to a farm outsideClinton, Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton, where Fremlin died on 17 April 2013, aged 88.[43] Munro and Fremlin also owned a home inComox, British Columbia.[20]
In 2009, Munro revealed that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiringcoronary arterybypass surgery.[44]
In 2002, Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir,Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro.[45]
On 7 July 2024, shortly after Munro's death, her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed in an essay in theToronto Star that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, hadsexually abused her starting in 1976 when she was nine years old and ending when she became a teenager. She told Munro about the abuse in 1992. After learning of the abuse, Munro separated from Fremlin for a few months, but ultimately went back to him.[47][48][49] According to Skinner, Munro said that she had been "told too late", loved her husband too much, and wanted to stay with him.[47][48] In 2002, Skinner cut off contact with Munro after Munro objected to Skinner not wanting Fremlin near her own children.[49][50] In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence and two years' probation.[50][48] Munro's other family members continued regular contact with Munro and Fremlin, while Skinner became estranged from all of them until after Munro's death.[49][50]
ForThe New York Times, Giles Harvey wrote: "Munro's stories—particularly those from the years after she learned of the abuse—are full of violated children, negligent mothers and marriages founded on secrets and lies... Munro seems to have spent much of her career absorbed by the same questions that readers have asked since Andrea published her essay. Why did she not protect her daughter? What led her to take Fremlin back? How could a writer who was capable of such power on the page prove so feeble in real life?"[49] Articles inThe New Yorker andThe New Republic note that many of Munro's stories written afterward relate to the topic, such as "Vandals", in which a woman vandalizes the house of a couple where the man molested her as a child, and "Dimension", in which a woman defends her desire to keep making jail visits to the husband who killed their three children.[50][51]
Munro's biographer Robert Thacker was aware of the allegations, but did not mention them in his 2005 biography of her, though Skinner contacted him with her story shortly before it was published.[52][53][54] Others had worked with Munro and were aware of Skinner’s experience, but did not make it public. This includedDouglas Gibson, Munro's editor and publisher.[50][54] Lawyer Robert Morris, who prosecuted Fremlin in his 2005 conviction, theorized that Fremlin's abuse went unreported for so long because "everyone was protecting the mother".[55]
Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and with integratedshort story cycles, in which she displayed "inarguable virtuosity".[56] Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade".[57] Munro was seen as a pioneer in short story telling, with theSwedish 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".[58] In herNew 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".[29] Her work is often compared with that of the most critically acclaimed short story writers.[59]
Her works and career have been ranked alongside other well-established short story writers such asAnton Chekhov andJohn Cheever.[58] 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."[60]
Munro's work has been considered a "national treasure" of Canada as it focuses largely on life in rural Canada from a woman's perspective.[61][62]
Canadian novelistMargaret Atwood called Munro a "pioneer for women, and for Canadians".[58] TheAssociated Press said that Munro created "stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away."[63]
Sherry Linkon, professor atGeorgetown University, said that Munro's works "helped remodel and revitalize the short-story form".[30] The complexity of the themes explored in her work, such as womanhood, death, relationships, aging, and themes associated with thecounterculture of the 1960s, were seen as groundbreaking.[29][64]
Upon winning theMan 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".[61]
The news of the sexual abuse of Munro's daughter caused a reassessment of both Munro's life and her literary legacy.[65][66][67] NovelistRebecca Makkai wrote, "the revelations don't just defile the artist, but the art itself".[68] WriterBrandon Taylor said, "I think we cannot talk about Munro's art without also talking about this aspect of her life".[69]
Additionally, she was awarded theO. 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)[99]
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 byMargaret Atwood
^Saul Bellow, the 1976 laureate, was born in Canada, but he moved to the United States at age nine and became a US citizen at twenty-six.
^Panofsky, Ruth (2012).The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.ISBN978-0-8020-9877-1.
^"Munro follows publisher Gibson from Macmillan".Toronto Star, 30 April 1986.
^An Appreciation of Alice MunroArchived 22 October 2013 at theWayback Machine, by Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano, Compiler and Editor. In:The Virginia Quarterly Review. VQR Symposium on Alice Munro. Summer 2006, pp. 102–105.
^Merkin, Daphne (24 October 2004)."Northern Exposures".The New York Times Magazine.Archived from the original on 10 March 2013. Retrieved25 February 2008.
^Holcombe, Garan (2005)."Alice Munro".Contemporary Writers. London: British Arts Council.Archived from the original on 30 September 2007. Retrieved14 May 2024.
Awano, Lisa Dickler."Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness."Virginia Quarterly Review (22 October 2010). Long-form book review ofToo Much Happiness in the context of Alice Munro's canon.
Gibson, Douglas.Stories About Storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau, and Others. (ECW Press, 2011.)Excerpt.
Hooper, BradThe Fiction of Alice Munro: An Appreciation (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008),ISBN978-0-275-99121-0
Howells, Coral Ann.Alice Munro. (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998),ISBN978-0-7190-4558-5
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.ISBN978-1-64014-020-2[1].
Mazur, Carol and Moulder, Cathy.Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. (Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2007)ISBN978-0-8108-5924-1
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