Alice Munro
THE Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died at 92, was a Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honoured short story writers.
Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel.
She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction.
Little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, Munro also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success.
Sales in North America alone exceeded one million copies and the Nobel announcement raised Dear Life to the high end of The
New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback fiction.
Other popular books included Too Much Happiness, TheView From Castle Rock and The Love Of A Good Woman.
Over half a century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away.
Her best known fiction included
The Beggar Maid, a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; Corrie ,in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect “equipped with a wife and young family”; and The Moons Of Jupiter, about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.
The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies.
She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.
“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,” Atwood wrote in 2013.
Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and permitted her characters to do the same.
She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around”, as she recalled during a 2003 interview.
Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro’s parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for”. Filmgoers would become familiar with The Bear CameOverTheMountain, the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s many past infidelities.
The Bear was adapted by director Sarah Polley into the feature film Away From Her, which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie.
In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in
Hateship, Loveship, an adaptation
of the story Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage ,in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her – unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.
Born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario, Munro won a university scholarship but left after two years, at age 20, to marry James Munro.
They divorced in 1972, after which she married geographer Gerald Fremlin. He died in 2013.
She had four daughters with James and is survived by three of them.