Alice Munro captures ‘being a human being’
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Alice Munro has been called one of the greatest practitioners of the modern short story, a writer who revolutionized, revitalized and, in a sense, completed acceptance of a literary art form that many considered just a way of practising to write novels.
Her exquisitely executed stories about the inner landscapes and external emotional entanglements of men and women living their lives in small towns are deeply rooted in her own quintessentially Canadian experiences. In 2013, she won the Nobel Prize for literature and has a following so ardent that fellow writers have tracked the landmarks in her fiction through Vancouver’s urban geography.
“She never cared for the stodgy repressed Vancouver of the 1950s and by all accounts she hasn’t warmed much to the sleek city of today,” David Laskin wrote for the New York Times. “And yet, after you read her Vancouver stories, you sense her watchful, uprooted presence everywhere.”
She was born in Wingham, Ont., on July 10, 1931, the eldest daughter of Robert Eric Laidlaw, who ran a marginal fox farm, and Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw, a former school teacher. The family descended from Scots immigrants who settled in Upper Canada. The community was socially stratified. After completing her primary grades in Lower Town, her mother sent Alice to school in Wingham. It required a three kilometre walk each way. She was perceptive and Robert Thacker, writing a biography for the Nobel foundation, observed that “these walks are a key to understanding Munro’s point of view, for in walking to school she ascended the social ladder and, returning, descended it through Lower Town, past its ‘casual bootleggers and unsuccessful thieves’. ”
Munro graduated from high school in 1949 as class valedictorian and won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario where she studied journalism but soon switched to English literature.
She published her first short story in the student literary magazine in 1950, but wouldn’t publish her first book of short stories until she was 37.
At university, she met and married fellow student Jim Munro, followed him first to Vancouver where he took a job with Eaton’s department store and then to Victoria in 1963 where the couple started a book store. Although she was living the typical life of a woman of her era, raising children at home while her husband ran the book store, he saw her as a writer and gave her a life-altering gift — a typewriter, both affirmation and liberation.
In 1968, she published Dance of the Happy Shades, and her first book won the Governor General’s Award for Literature.
Her marriage failed and she returned to Ontario and continued writing.
“Alice Munro has meditated the life she has lived herself, that she has seen others live, the lives she has known and imagined,” author and biographer Robert Thanker wrote. “Through their complexity, through their clarity, and through their precision, the stories Munro has published capture the very feeling of what it is like to live, to be alive. The feeling of just being a human being.”