“The Right Things Came Together in the Right Relation”: Cather and Munro, a Reprise

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article begins by revisiting a conversation I had with Alice Munro in 1987 in which she named her favorite story by Willa Cather, “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932). After that conversation I went on to analyze Cather’s influence on Munro in her own story, “Dulse” (1980)—where Cather is in effect a character—in my article “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather” (1992). But until now I have not pursued the structural symmetry mentioned in passing there between “Old Mrs. Harris” and Munro’s “The Progress of Love” (1985), the title story of her sixth collection. This article does that, treating the three women in each story—grandmother, daughter, granddaughter—through both their autobiographical underpinnings and the narrative wisdom each story ultimately yields. This comparison is an instance of direct influence, of one great writer modeling for another.