The Canadian writer Alice Munro’s fourteen collections of short stories have garnered her numerous international honours, including the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Man Booker International Prize. Among her fiction’s outstanding attributes are its concern with women’s lives and with the complexities of gender in a changing society, its nuanced accounts of rural communities, and its evocation of the layered, often surprising character of seemingly ordinary lives. She is celebrated as one of the world’s greatest writers of short fiction.

Munro’s protagonists are often women of her own generation who, in their youth during the 1930s and 1940s, are both oppressed by and acute observers of the social strictures and dynamics in their small-town communities. In stories set during later years, when the protagonists are often wives and mothers, they find themselves caught between traditional gender roles and new possibilities in the wake of the sexual revolution. Meanwhile, the sense that there are various truths lying just beneath the surface of everyday existence pervades Munro’s fiction. In manifold ways, she suggests that people’s lives are, as she writes in Lives of Girls and Women, “deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum” (Munro, 1982: 249).

Born Alice Ann Laidlaw in 1931, she grew up near the small town of Wingham in Huron County, Ontario, residing in a red-brick farmhouse with her parents, a brother, and a sister. Both her father, Robert, and her mother, Anne, had also been raised on farms – her father in nearby Blyth and her mother in the Ottawa Valley – and were of a class that Munro called “the privileged poor” (Ross, 1992: 38). The ancestry of the Laidlaw family has been traced to the eighteenth-century Scottish writer James Hogg.

Munro was brought up in the United Church of Canada and was a member of the Canadian Girls in Training. Robert was a fox-farmer, a security guard at a foundry, and then a turkey farmer who began to write at the end of his life. His novel, The MacGregors, was published posthumously in 1979. Anne, a former schoolteacher, raised the children. As Munro describes it, the Laidlaws’ farm was in a “kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived [...] It was a community of outcasts” (Ross, 1992: 18). Versions of Huron County would feature as the setting for much of her fiction. She attended the Lower Town School and then the Wingham and District High School, where she was a top student. As a child, Munro dreamed of becoming an actor, and at one time she planned a Gothic novel to be called Charlotte Muir. In her teenage years, she worked in the summer as a maid for a family in the affluent Toronto neighbourhood of Rosedale.

In 1949, Munro received a scholarship to attend the University of Western Ontario – now Western University – in the nearby city of London, where she studied journalism before changing to English. To aid in funding her studies, she worked part-time at the London Public Library, as well as at the university’s Lawson Library, and waited tables in the summer. Munro’s first published short story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow”, appeared in the university’s student literary magazine, Folio, in 1950.

She married Jim Munro, a fellow student who hailed from Oakville, Ontario, in 1951. They moved to Vancouver before Alice could complete her university degree, and Jim was employed by the Eaton’s department store there for the next twelve years, while Alice worked at the Vancouver Public Library and raised their three daughters, leaving her little time to write. In 1953, the first daughter was born, and Munro also had her first magazine sale, publishing the story “A Basket of Strawberries” in Mayfair. In the 1950s and 1960s, she would continue to publish stories in Canadian magazines. During the late 1950s, Munro worked on a novel, alternatively titled “Death of a White Fox” and “The Norwegian”, which was never finished. Meanwhile, her mother’s death from Parkinson’s disease in 1959 was the impetus for another story, “The Peace of Utrecht”. It won acclaim after being published in Robert Weaver’s Tamarack Review in 1960, and it signalled a shift towards a more personal focus in Munro’s fiction. Weaver had also “discovered” Mordecai Richler, and his Anthology program on CBC Radio played a key role in giving Munro’s work a wider audience.

The Munros moved to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1963 and established a bookstore, Munro’s Books. Five years later, Alice’s first short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published. It contains pieces from over two decades of writing, and Munro herself noted in interviews the difference in maturity and tone between early stories such as the Gothic “A Trip to the Coast” and later ones such as “Walker Brothers Cowboy”, which opens the collection. Most of the stories are set in a fictionalized version of Huron County, and their occasional tendency towards the grotesque reveals the influence of writers of the American South such as Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. Munro has said of reading those writers’ work: “[T]here was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal [...] I came to feel that was our territory, whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men’s territory” (McCulloch and Simpson, 1994: 255). Munro’s first book meditates on themes of secrecy and the unexpected in the everyday that would continue to inflect her writing. A characteristic passage from “Walker Brothers Cowboy” reads:

So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits, and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine. (Munro, 2000: 18)

Dance of the Happy Shades won Canada’s highest literary prize for fiction at the time, the Governor General’s Literary Award, but it still did not manage to sell out its initial print run of 2500 copies.

Her next book, Lives of Girls and Women, was published in 1971, won the Canadian Booksellers’ Award, and enjoyed greater popular success than had Munro’s debut book. Lives of Girls and Women has been marketed as a novel but might be seen, instead, as a set of linked stories. The book recounts the life of its narrator, Del Jordan, whose rural upbringing in southwestern Ontario is indicative of the book’s autobiographical elements. Early chapters are particularly notable for their evocations of geography and local colour; as the book’s title intimates, there is also sustained attention to the challenges of growing up female in a patriarchal world. The final chapter, “Epilogue: The Photographer”, is strongly metafictional, as the adult Del considers the difficulties of writing a novel about her hometown. The pre-publication title of Lives of Girls and Women, “Real Life”, suggests Munro’s preoccupation with what constitutes the “real” and how it might be represented in fiction.

In 1973, Alice and Jim Munro’s marriage ended, and Alice moved to Nelson, BC, to teach creative writing for the summer at Notre Dame University. She then taught at York University in Ontario before becoming writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario. There, she encountered Gerald Fremlin, a geographer and acquaintance from her undergraduate days whose fiction had also been published in Folio. The two moved to Clinton, Ontario, not far from Wingham, and were married. In later years, they would spend the winter in Comox, BC.

In 1974, Munro published her collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You which, as the title suggests, follows Lives of Girls and Women in attending to the complications of storytelling. The title further reflects a common Munro technique of deploying cliché terms in ways that nod to the terms’ remarkable cultural or metaphysical connotations. Also in 1974, a television play by Munro adapting “How I Met My Husband”, one of the stories in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, was broadcasted. It would also be adapted as a play for the 1976 Blyth Festival. Munro would go on to write the script for a further television production, 1847: The Irish, which was broadcasted on CBC in 1977.

Munro’s collection Who Do You Think You Are? was published in 1978. Like Lives of Girls and Women, it presents a series of linked stories chronicling the life of a young woman growing up in rural Ontario. The protagonist, Rose, eventually leaves for university and then for married life in British Columbia before returning to Ontario. As the title suggests, the theme of identity is central to the book. Rose’s chosen career as an actor is telling: in particular, she gains an increasing awareness of the ways in which people perform their identities, whether regional or gendered. The book was nearly published as Rose and Janet and originally contained the stories of two different narrators, but Munro made last-minute changes at her own expense that merged the narratives into a single protagonist’s life. Who Do You Think You Are? appeared outside of Canada as The Beggar Maid and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It also earned Munro a second Governor General’s Literary Award. Its opening story, “Royal Beatings”, had been published by The New Yorker in March 1977 and was the first of many Munro stories over the course of her career to appear first in that magazine.

In the period of 1977-1981, Munro travelled often, including a 1979 visit to Australia as winner of the Canada-Australia Literary Prize and a trip to China with a group of seven Canadian writers. In 1978, she became involved in controversy when a Huron County group tried to keep several books, including Lives of Girls and Women and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, out of local high schools. Munro was one of three members of The Writers’ Union of Canada who spoke out against censorship in a local forum.

The first and last stories in Munro’s 1982 collection, The Moons of Jupiter, are ones from Who Do You Think You Are? that Munro removed from the earlier book at the last moment. The Moons of Jupiter features more complex narratives and wider time-frames than Munro’s previous work, as well as more characters. There are also fewer first-person narrators and, as the title hints, there is a greater geographical expansiveness: the collection includes stories set in Australia and New Brunswick. The title story deals fictionally with the death of Munro’s father, who passed away in 1976 after a heart operation.

In 1982, the first academic conference on Munro’s work was held at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In 1984, a cinematic adaptation of Munro’s story “Boys and Girls” won an Academy Award in the live-action-short category. Then, in 1986, Munro published the collection The Progress of Love. It features stories once more set predominantly in rural Ontario or Vancouver, and it further evinces a preoccupation with place, the untold or untellable, and the lives of women. It added to a body of work that was rewarded in the same year with the Marian Engel Award, given in recognition of an outstanding oeuvre by a female Canadian writer.

Munro’s 1990 collection, Friend of My Youth, is marked by a growing interest in examining history. In the title story, the narrator considers her mother’s past, while “Meneseteung” is Munro’s account of a fictional nineteenth-century “poetess”. The book’s further interest in adultery and romantic relationships prompted Entertainment Today teasingly to retitle the book “Sex Lives of Canadians” (Ross, 1992: 89). It won the Ontario Trillium Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region). In 1991, Munro was given the Molson Prize for her contribution to Canadian letters. In 1994, her next collection, Open Secrets, won the W.H. Smith Literary Award. The stories in Open Secrets are set predominantly in the fictional town of Carstairs, Ontario, and certain characters and situations recur across them.

The stories in Open Secrets are notably longer than Munro’s earlier ones, and the trend continued in her 1998 collection, The Love of a Good Woman, in which the title story runs over seventy pages. Her ability to evoke whole lives and communities in such stories led critics to identify a novelistic quality in her short fiction, even as she claimed to have failed several times in attempting to write a novel. The stories in The Love of a Good Woman tend to resist a conventional linear narrative structure, in keeping with Munro’s oft-quoted claim in her 1982 essay “What Is Real?”: “I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It’s more like a house” (Munro, 1982: 224). The Love of a Good Woman won the 1998 Giller Prize.

Literary critics frequently characterize Munro’s post-1998 work as exemplifying a “late style”, marked by an increased focus on themes of aging and a shift towards more impersonal stories. The first collection to appear in this period was Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which was published in 2001 and won the Governor General’s Literary Award. The final story in the collection, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, about a husband with a history of infidelity dealing with his wife’s development of Alzheimer’s disease, may be Munro’s most famous work, having been turned into an Oscar-nominated film, Away from Her, in 2006. The title story, meanwhile, was adapted into the 2013 film Hateship, Loveship.

Munro’s Selected Stories appeared in 1996. In 2003, she published another collection of selected stories, No Love Lost, curated by fellow Canadian author Jane Urquhart. In 2004, Munro’s new collection, Runaway, won the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The book consists of stories in Munro’s usual geographical landscapes of small-town Ontario and British Columbia. The predominant theme is love, or its absence, whether romantic or between parents and children. A unifying motif is the characters’ desire to escape, driven by factors such as unhappy marriages, family issues, and the yearning to flee provincial towns in search of adventure. One story in the collection, “Passion”, won the O. Henry Award. Runaway also includes a triptych of stories – “Chance”, “Soon”, and “Silence” – depicting episodes at different points in the life of their protagonist, Juliet. The stories were adapted into the 2006 film Julieta.

Published in 2006, Munro’s collection The View from Castle Rock includes narratives detailing Munro’s Scottish ancestry along with fiction inspired by her own experiences. The book was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker International Prize, an accolade recognizing a writer’s literary excellence across their body of work. The jury’s citation reads:

Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before. (Saperstein, 2024)

Also in 2009, Munro published the collection Too Much Happiness, which deals with loss, loneliness, regret, separation, and death. She portrays individuals striving to find clues that may lead them towards healing or, at the very least, help them come to terms with their fragmented existence. The title story is about a real figure, Sophia Kovalevsky (1850–1891), a Russian mathematician, writer, and feminist icon. Drawing on biographical research, the story blends historical fact with imaginative reconstruction. Another story in the collection, “Free Radicals”, centres on a character diagnosed with cancer, a disease for which Munro herself had received treatment. The collection was a finalist for the 2009 Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Munro published New Selected Stories in 2011. It was followed by her final collection, Dear Life, in 2012. The stories in Dear Life are shorter than many in her earlier collections, while the characters appear at stages of life ranging from adolescence to old age. The collection concludes with “Finale”, a suite of four pieces that Munro described as “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”, and “the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life” (Munro, 2013: 255). Dear Life won a third Trillium Book Award for Munro and became her best-selling work. One of the stories in it, “Corrie”, won the O. Henry Award.

In 2013, Munro became the first Canadian – excluding Canadian-born American author Saul Bellow – and the thirteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy honoured Munro as a “master of the contemporary short story”, claiming that she had “come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart and its caprices” (Englund, 2013). Munro expressed her gratitude, stating: “I’m particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians. I’m happy too that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing” (“Alice”).

In a 2012 interview with the New Yorker, Munro announced that it was time for her to cease writing, as she was “losing names or words in a commonplace way” (Treisman, 2012). In 2013, Gerald Fremlin died. The next year, Munro released Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995–2014. In 2019, she moved from Clinton to Port Hope, Ontario, to live with her daughter. Munro passed away on May 13, 2024, after suffering from dementia for over a decade.

In Wingham, the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story was launched in 2015, and Western University established the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity in 2018. Catherine Sheldrick Ross published a biography, Alice Munro: A Double Life, in 1992, and Robert Thacker published another, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, in 2005. An updated edition appeared in 2011. In 2001, Munro’s daughter Sheila Munro published a memoir, Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro.

In 2024, Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, who had primarily lived with Jim Munro during her childhood after he and Alice divorced, revealed publicly that for several years, beginning when Andrea was nine years old, she had been sexually abused by Gerald Fremlin during summer stays with her mother and him in Clinton. Skinner also revealed that she had told her mother of the abuse in 1992 and that Alice Munro had initially left Fremlin but eventually returned to him. Skinner further disclosed that in 2004, two years after terminating contact with her mother, Skinner had reported the abuse to the police, and that, as a result, Fremlin had been convicted of indecent assault in 2005 and sentenced to two years’ probation.

Works Cited

“Alice Munro is 1st Canadian Woman to Win Nobel Literature Prize.” CBC News. 10 Oct. 2013. Online at https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/alice-munro-is-1st-canadian-woman-to-win-nobel-literature-prize-1.1958383
Englund, Peter. “Award Ceremony Speech.” 10 Dec. 2013. The Nobel Prize. Online at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2013/ceremony-speech/
Munro, Alice. “The Art of Fiction CXXXVII.” Interview with Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson. Paris Review 131 (Summer 1994). 227-64.
---. Dance of the Happy Shades. 1968. New York: Vintage, 2000.
---. Dear Life. 2012. New York: Penguin, 2013.
---. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. New York: Penguin, 1982.
---. “What Is Real?” Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stories. Ed. J. Metcalf. Toronto: Methuen, 1982. 223-26.
Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW, 1992.
Saperstein, Pat. “Alice Munro, Nobel Prize-Winning Canadian Author of ‘Away from Her,’ Dies at 92.” Variety. 14 May 2024. Online at https://variety.com/2024/film/news/alice-munro-dead-author-nobel-prize-1236002912/
Treisman, Deborah. “On ‘Dear Life’: An Interview with Alice Munro.” The New Yorker. 20 Nov. 2012. Online at https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro

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Citation: McGill, Robert, Zhitong Chen. "Alice Munro". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 June 2002; last revised 04 July 2024. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5050, accessed 20 September 2024.]

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