Munro,Alice

Abstract

During the four decades since her first collection,Dance of the Happy Shades(1968), won Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, Alice Munro's stories have been widely acclaimed as among the finest being written in the English‐speaking world. To date, Munro has published 12 books of stories; like Mavis Gallant and Katherine Mansfield, she has concentrated her fictional powers on the short story, although she has also written story sequences, novellas, and books of linked stories. Many of her fictions draw on her family and her home territory of Huron County in southwestern Ontario, but Munro always reshapes this material to form stories populated by characters that both invoke and transform their autobiographical and geographical settings. Munro's stories often engage readers first at an everyday surface level that then becomes a membrane: as Del Jordan, the narrator ofLives of Girls and Women(1971) puts it in a famous phrase, “People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved over with kitchen linoleum” (249). This apparent paradox of contradictions converging to reveal the depths of her characters’ lives is emblematic of Munro's fictional signature.