Alice Monro said she “Wanted to Do Something Great, Great the Way Men Do”

Written by Anne Sutton – Co-Coordinator of the Classic Book Club (Richmond, VA) 

Alice Munro was 82 years old when she won The Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. This followed many other awards over the course of her long, consistently wonderful writing career. Other than Isaac Singer in 1928, no one else has won that prize for short stories. Some people refer to the short story as the single mother of literature. That is to say, it is inferior to the novel. So this honor thrilled Canadians and all lovers of short stories. She is sometimes referred to as the modern-day Anton Chekhov who, as we know, was a wonderful short story writer. Around 60 of her short stories were published in the “New Yorker”, and many others in additionally prestigious publications. She published 14 collections of original short stories, one novel, and 7 short story compilations. Some of her stories were adapted for films such as two of the stories we discussed in our August Classic Book Club online Zoom session:  “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories” and “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which had a different title: “Away from Her.” Other writers who greatly admire her include A.S. Byatt, Jonathan Franzen, and Margaret Atwood. Franzen refers to her as “the great one,” Atwood as “an international literary saint,” and the “New Yorker” folks say she is “our blessing.”

Her stories changed the architecture of modern short stories, especially in their tendency to move forward and backward in time; they are not sentimental nor are they judgmental. Like in Chekhov’s stories, not much happens.  The Plot is not their main focus, but instead, they focus on the moments of sudden enlightenment when an epiphany occurs. They deal with both love and work and the failings of both and show us the relentlessness of time and our human inability to delay or prevent the relentless movement forward of time. In addition to domestic fiction, she has also written historical fiction and crime thrillers.

“Alice Munro’s stories changed the architecture of modern short stories, especially in their tendency to move forward and backward in time.”

In her early years, her writing focused on a young female character growing up in a tiny Canadian town, trying to make sense of that world, confronting deep-seated customs and traditions, navigating family relationships, experiencing shame and guilt like she grew up with where religion was really important. The characters in these small towns are very rigid and disapproving of sex, have repressed emotions, secrets, and hidden sexual excesses. As she grew older, so did her main female characters, who often left their home towns, married, and had children. They experienced love, divorce, heartbreak, sickness, and death. Then they often return to a small town like the one they grew up in. But they see it with fresh eyes now that they have been to university and have seen more of the range of human experience and the wider world.

In her final period as an author, she explores old age and even the life experience of her ancestors. “The Bear came over the Mountain” is a good example of her later writing.  Her characters are aware that as they pursue their dreams and their self-interest, or that other people suffer, as we see in “Family Furnishings.” They are seen as uppity if they excel in academics or move away from the small town where they grew up.

She does not, as much, show young characters falling in love, but instead joins married couples years down the line. Then she explores their lives before they met each other and after they grow old and confront illness. She writes about sexual encounters and affairs but usually does not focus much on the actual sex, but instead on the interpersonal tango between the two characters.

She was a writer who revised endlessly. She has been known to retrieve a manuscript that was already at the printers so she could change it from the first-person narrator to the third person. She even published more than one version of the same story, sometimes in the same year, one time thirty years later. She wrote eight versions of her story “Powers.” You can imagine the frustration this sometimes caused her agents, editors, and publishers!

Alice was the oldest of three children in her family. Her father was a failed fox and mink farmer and later a turkey farmer. Her mother had been a schoolteacher and developed early-onset Parkinson’s in her forties, with the result that Alice took over the household duties and taking care of her siblings. Her father was not averse to beating his children, yet he shows up sympathetically in her stories for the most part. He loved reading and spent every Sunday with a book or story. Her mother was domineering and dissatisfied, and we see mothers in her fiction patterned on her mother. Alice was an avid reader and writer from an early age, and her parents neither encouraged nor discouraged her in this. She was given a two-year scholarship to a university and supplemented that with jobs as a waitress and library clerk and by donating her blood. When the scholarship money was depleted, she dropped out of school and married a fellow student named James Munro. They moved to a town where he managed an Eaton department store. They moved again to another small town where they opened a bookstore. They had three daughters, one of whom did not survive even one day. They later had another daughter.

She wrote in any spare time she could find, such as when her children napped. She found that short stories were what she always ended up writing even though she knew that novels were more admired and brought more income. She went through a bad time emotionally when she simply could not write because she was losing confidence in becoming a published author. She was very ambitious and said she wanted to do something great,  great the way men do.”

                                              She was very ambitious and said she wanted to do something great,  great the way men do.

She did ultimately manage to write one novel: The Lives of Girls and Women, but then found herself returning right back to short stories. Her first marriage fell apart, and for the first time, she had the pressure to make money to support herself and her children. You get the impression that it was the sexual revolution that caused her marriage to fall apart and that maybe Alice was the one who strayed. She was fortunate that she lived in Canada instead of the United States or England because there was support for writers of short stories in Canada. Also, short stories sold well in Canada, unlike in other places. After years of pressure to write novels, she met Doug Gibson, a publisher, who assured her that the conventional wisdom about her need to write novels was all wrong. He told her he would never pressure her to write novels, and that he wanted to publish her short stories. From then on, he was her Canadian publisher A few years later, she married another fellow student from her university days, Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer. He died in 2013 at age 88. Munro herself has been treated for cancer and had coronary artery bypass surgery. Her daughter Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir entitled “Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro.”  (About a dozen regular participants of our now monthly Zoom Book Club discussed her life and works, and concluded that she indeed did write some very good works -Editor)                                  

The following is a list of her story collections and awards, as culled from Wikipedia.com

Original Short-story Collections

• Dance of the Happy Shades – 1968 (winner of the 1968 Governor General’s Award for Fiction)
• Lives of Girls and Women – 1971 (winner of the Canadian Bookseller’s Award^[40])
• Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You – 1974
• Who Do You Think You Are? – 1978 (winner of the 1978 Governor General’s Award for Fiction; also published as The Beggar Maid; short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980^[40])
• The Moons of Jupiter – 1982 (nominated for a Governor General’s Award)
• The Progress of Love – 1986 (winner of the 1986 Governor General’s Award for Fiction)
• Friend of My Youth – 1990 (winner of the Trillium Book Award)
• Open Secrets – 1994 (nominated for a Governor General’s Award)
• The Love of a Good Woman – 1998 (winner of the 1998 Giller Prize and the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award)
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – 2001 (republished as Away From Her)
• Runaway – 2004 (winner of the Giller Prize and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize) ISBN 1-4000-4281-X
• The View from Castle Rock – 2006
• Too Much Happiness – 2009
• Dear Life – 2012

Short-story Compilations

• Selected Stories (later retitled Selected Stories 1968-1994 and A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968–1994) – 1996
• No Love Lost – 2003
• Vintage Munro – 2004
• 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 by Margaret Atwood
• New Selected Stories – 2011
• Lying Under the Apple Tree. New Selected Stories, 15 stories, Alice Munro 2011, Vintage, London 2014, ISBN 978-0-0995-9377-5 (paperback)
• Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014 – 2014

Litchatte Editor, Murray Ellison invites your comments to be posted on this site, under this article. Either Anne Sutton or Murray will respond quickly.

by