Alice Munro (1931-2024): Master of the Form

WHEN IT COMES to origin stories, Alice Munro has one that would perfectly fit into a short story about the early stirrings of a writer. As a child Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid was read to her. She found the fact that the Little Mermaid did not get her Prince, even after making enormous sacrifices, desperately sad. She needed to do right by the Little Mermaid and so she wrote a story that would give the beguiling half fish-half human a happy ending. It did not matter to the child Alice that no one would read her story, but to her it was impor­tant that Little Mermaid got what she deserved.

This was the first story that Munro wrote. And it, perhaps, hints at the many achievements, and themes (from equality to salvation) that would follow her through her writing career, mainly from the 1930s to the 1980s. Canadian short story writer Munro’s first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) won the Governor General’s Award, then Canada’s highest literary prize. From the 1970s her fiction regularly appeared in the New Yorker. She would go on to win the Man Booker International Prize (2009) and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. While the list of her awards highlights her accomplishments, it doesn’t tell us who she is.

Munro’s fellow author and compatriot Margaret Atwood perhaps best understood her both personally and profession­ally. In Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Stories (2006), Atwood writes an introduction which contextualises and humanises Munro. Munro belonged to Ontario, a large province of Canada, which Atwood describes as “an area of considerable interest, but also of considerable psychic murkiness and oddity.” Here each family has “long memories and stashes of bones in the closets”. It is these memories and bones that Munro plumbs in her stories.

While her parents read—her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father a fox and mink farmer—she was the only person she knew who wrote stories. On her long walks to school, she’d make up stories, just as she would later when her children were at school. In an interview to the Nobel committee, after winning the award, she said, “I’d no sense of inferiority being a young girl at all. Because I lived in Ontario where women did most of the reading and the telling of stories.” This gave her a quiet confidence, which was shaken only later when she was submerged in the literary world. She got mar­ried at 20, before she finished college, and her first husband Jim gifted her a typewriter.

In 1963 the couple opened a bookstore called Munro’s Books (which still exists) in Victoria, Canada. During an interview, while signing au­tographs at the same bookshop, Munro said when it opened, the shop gave her more than a refuge. “I was a housewife, a writing housewife. And then with the bookshop there was this sudden wonderful chance to get into the world.” In Munro’s fiction a slice of Canada comes alive, or as Atwood says, it is “anatomized”.

Her stories rattle the bones in closets, but they are also endowed with grace and salvation. Her characters are many things, but what they are most of all is authentic and honest, they have no “dreariness of spirit”. Even when they are being shifty and slippery, they are aware of it. Munro said that while her early stories were flowery and ended happily, with time, and after reading Wuthering Heights she moved to more tragic affairs.

When she was asked by the Nobel committee if she ever thought she’d win the world’s most prestigious literary prize, she laughed uproariously. And then added, “No. Because I am a woman.” After a pause she continued that she knew other women have won it, and added, “Most writers underestimate their own writing…”

Munro will long be remembered and celebrated because in her stories, just as within a human heart, a reader can sense a kernel of truth shine through.

Alice MunroAlice Munro’s Best: Selected StoriesauthorDance of the Happy ShadesNobel Laureateshort story