Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Alice Munro
Standard Name: Munro, Alice
Birth Name: Alice Ann Laidlaw
AM
, a Canadian writer of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is widely regarded as one of the leading modern practitioners of the short story form. One of her collections is alternatively titled a novel. Her work embodies a quiet, even understated, but inescapable feminism.
The village named Craik is some fifty miles from Arbigland. Canadian novelist Alice Munro
, describes the village as it was a generation or two before HC
Friends, Associates
Carol Shields
CS
, who had said that in the 1960s she knew no writers, became a personal friend of her fellow author Alice Munro
, who called her (according to Margaret Atwood
) just a luminous person.
qtd. in
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, 26 Aug. 2003, p. 28.
28
Friends, Associates
Margaret Laurence
Among her fellow writers ML
enjoyed a long and close friendship with Adele Wiseman
. She also became a friend of the younger Alice Munro
, who championed her in the censorship affair.
Intertextuality and Influence
Charles Dickens
A Child's History of England, which appeared in Household Words between 25 January 1851 and 10 December , was an early influence on the child who became Alice Munro
.
“From the Archives: Alice Munro and Diana Athill in Conversation”. PEN Canada, 21 Oct. 2009.
Intertextuality and Influence
Isak Dinesen
Critic Sara Stambaugh
writes that many of the stories in [this volume] are formulated so cryptically as to be opaque without the help offered by the later work.
Stambaugh, Sara. The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen. UMI Research Press, 1988.
3
Alice Munro
pays subtle tribute in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Porter
Fifty years after its publication, Ann Taylor Gilbert
still used The Scottish Chiefs as a measure of a book which had really absorbed her.
Gilbert, Ann Taylor. Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert. Editor Gilbert, Josiah, H. S. King, 1874, 2 vols., http://U of A, HSS Ruth N .
The excitement generated by The Equations of Love has not carried into current criticism. However, Alice Munro
has always held EW
in extremely high esteem, delighting in her writing style with its hard clear prose...
Literary responses
Katherine Mansfield
More recently, writers citing Mansfield's importance to them have included Brigid Brophy
, Angus Wilson
, and Canadian Alice Munro
. Janice Kulyk Keefer
's Thieves: A Novel of Katherine Mansfield, 2004, presents a...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jolley
EJ
invoked as an appropriate description of her own motivation, Flaubert
's dictum that writing comes from an inner wound.
Joussen, Ulla. “An Interview with Elizabeth Jolley”. Kunapipi, Vol.
15
, No. 2, 1993, pp. 37-43.
40
She said of Johnson
's Rasselas and Goethe
's Elective Affinities (both of which...
Textual Production
Claire Luckham
CL
's musical adaptation of Defoe
's novel Moll Flanders was staged in 1986. More recently she has performed a valuable service by providing the catalyst for the delivery to radio audiences of much women's...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Diana Athill
Nicholas Lezard
wrote in the Guardian that this book teaches, in every line[,] the consolations of age, the common, shareable tone of experience. Athill begins the book, in fact, with her own old age, and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Margaret Atwood
She looks at what she calls the Grey Owl
Syndrome—the envy and appropriation by white writers of native identity; at the web of stories surrounding the last expedition of Sir John Franklin
; and...
Timeline
14 November 2004: Following the award of the Giller Prize to...
Writing climate item
14 November 2004
Following the award of the Giller Prize to Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro
, the New York Times Book Review called her one of the most important living writers, worthy to receive the Nobel Prize...
Texts
Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. Ryerson, 1968.
Munro, Alice. Dear Life: Stories. McClelland and Stewart, 2012.
Munro, Alice. Family Furnishings. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Munro, Alice. Friend of My Youth. McClelland and Stewart, 1990.