Alice Munro, short story writer, 1931-2024

In an interview conducted after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, Alice Munro recalled her earliest beginnings as a writer. As a little girl in Wingham, Ontario, she read Hans Christian Andersen’s bleak tale The Little Mermaid and was shocked by the story of a creature — a woman — who painfully transforms herself for a love she can never have. “I thought she deserved more than death on the water,” Munro said. She created a new, happy ending: and so Munro’s creative life opened up for her.

In rural Canada — where her father was a farmer of fox and mink, her mother a former schoolteacher stricken by Parkinson’s disease — “women did most of the reading, women did most of the telling of stories,” she said. Her creation was a private act. “I didn’t need to tell anybody.”

It is that sense of privacy, of a deep internal emotional mechanism, that makes the short stories of Alice Munro so enduring and compelling. And the way in which people, most often women, are asked to distort their natures for the convenience of others remained a powerful theme in her work.

Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968 and won the Governor General’s Literary Award, widely regarded as Canada’s Pulitzer Prize; her final one, Dear Life, appeared in 2012. Over the course of 14 collections, set almost entirely in Ontario, she allowed readers to enter compelling lives that are anything but parochial. The Swedish Academy called her “a master of the contemporary short story”, citing her ability to “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages”.

The academy’s praise has the air of a backhanded compliment: seeming to imply that the short story is a lesser form. Munro — like Chekhov, to whom she was often justly compared — proved that it is not. Take 1977’s The Beggar Maid, the second story Munro published in The New Yorker. It is one of the tales centred on Rose, the arc of whose life loosely traces the author’s; it is set in Munro’s fictional town of Hanratty, which she made as much her own as William Faulkner did his Yoknapatawpha County — though Munro was never drawn to Faulkner, taking inspiration from other writers of the American South such as Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty.

In this story, Patrick is a graduate student and Rose a scholarship girl at university in London, Ontario; he falls for her after she describes a stranger grabbing her bare leg in the library stacks. The event is accidental, a little strange and described in perfect detail. As the man runs away, Rose feels the shelves vibrating. It is an unsettling beginning for a romance: Patrick’s love for Rose “had become a fixed, even furious idea for him”. Like the Little Mermaid, her characters are driven by forces beyond their control. Unlike her girlhood retelling of Andersen’s tale, Munro moved away from happy endings to build rich, complex, difficult worlds inside so-called “ordinary” lives.

She called herself a fairly regular housewife, writing “in times off”. Born Alice Laidlaw on July 10 1931, she was the eldest of three children. Her first published story appeared in an undergraduate literary magazine while she attended the University of Western Ontario on a scholarship for two years. At college she met her first husband, Jim Munro, whom she married at 20. Together they founded Munro’s Books in Victoria in 1963 — an independent bookstore still going strong. But the marriage faltered; in 1975 she and Gerald Fremlin, who had also been a student at Western, moved into the house in Huron County in which he had grown up. This was her home, and the locus of her work, for the rest of her life.

Alice Munro was one of the generation who created modern Canadian literature, the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize (and only the 13th woman). Three times the winner of the Governor General’s Award, twice winner of the Giller Prize, she pulled her collection Too Much Happiness from consideration for the Giller in 2009 feeling a younger writer should have a crack. That year she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her whole body of work. Three daughters survive her; one, Sheila, is the author of the 2001 memoir Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.

Her compass looked small: it was not. “Any life can be interesting,” she said. You just have to be there.” The first sentence of a Munro story puts the reader absolutely there. Her aims were plain. “I want my stories to move people,” she said. She wished readers to be changed by her stories and over decades, we were — changed and vastly enriched.