Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

out an American edition of
Dance
in 1973 while, concurrently, selling rights for both titles to Allen Lane in England, which published
Lives
in the fall of 1973 and
Dance
the next spring. They also arranged a mass-market paperback edition of
Lives
published by Signet/New American Library in 1974.
    The reception of
Lives of Girls and Women
when it was published in the fall of 1972 in the United States and in Britain the next year was understandably different from its reaction at home. Reviewers saw its distinctive qualities clearly; most are characterized by forthright praise accompanied by a few hesitations or a quibble or two.
Lives
offers “some of the finest reading to reach us this year,” Virginia Brasier wrote in the San Bernardino
Sun-Telegram
, asserting that “Alice Munro is a writer to watch.” Janet Burroway in the
Tallahassee Democrat
held that “the pleasures of
Lives of Girls and Women
are those of skill rather than brilliance, recognition rather than revelation, flow rather than design.” Like Canadian reviewers, many Americans focused on the book as a novel; Audrey C. Foote in the
Washington Post
notes that “it is designated a novel; it is not a finished novel but one in gestation, a series of expertly written short stories and memoirs which as the narrator develops from child to woman, mature into a novel.” Mary Walfoort in the
Milwaukee Journal
sees the book as being “without a plot, with none of the tension that plot can generate,” but “it manages nevertheless to spin a gauzy, strong and fascinating web, and the unwary reader is trapped tightly in it from the first page on.” Something of the same note is struck by Barbara Rex in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
: “People, the seasons, time passing,the Wawanash River run through the book and hold it together. The episodes are tender, brutal, shocking, full of humor and also anguish.”
    Writing in
Time
, Geoffrey Wolff effused that though the “threads of this yarn are common enough stuff … what Alice Munro makes of it is rare.… By her tact, and power to recall, select and reduce, she has translated Jubilee into a birthplace, or something more than the name of a town. Call it fiction; praise it.” An anonymous review in the
New Yorker
was more restrained when treating
Lives
in its “Briefly Noted” section, saying, “The straggling town of Jubilee becomes almost immediately familiar to us, and some of the characters,” Del’s mother and Fern Dogherty, “are given to us full size and with a touch of pity that makes them very real.”
    Given the times and Munro’s subject and approach, many reviewers noted a relation between
Lives
and the women’s liberation movement. Barbara Rex, the reviewer in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, commented in passing that Del’s mother Addie is “an early Women’s Lib type” whom “Del regards with shame and pride.” Margaret Ferrari, in
America
, writes that this “is not a strident novel, full of women’s lib jargon and sentiments. Del’s tone of voice is breezy and good-natured, closer to Huckleberry Finn’s than to Betty Friedan’s. The reader is made aware of her social conditioning, but obliquely and objectively.” Mary Ellin Barrett, writing in
Cosmopolitan
, takes Ferrari’s observation deeper since
Lives
“had me shivering from start to finish with what I call the ‘recognition’ goose bumps. You know the feeling, when you read something written out of another time, another land, an alien way of life, and suddenly you say to yourself,
Hey, how did she know that?
” She continued, “All sorts of women … are going to feel … close to Del Jordan and to Alice Munro, who, in a cool prose as brightly colored as a dime-store window, has put the awakening female under glass as Salinger once did the male. A lighter Sylvia Plath, a budding Jean Stafford – that’s who this lovely writer is.”
    This last notice suggests a powerful reach for
Lives
among its American readers that was confirmed as the book’s reputation grew. When the paperback edition was published, in January 1974, poetDenise Levertov called it “an unclassifiable work”; noting Munro’s disclaimer that
Lives
is “autobiographical in form but not in fact,” she observed that if this “is true, I can think of no other work of fiction that appears so utterly nonfictional.” Like Leo Simpson’s review of
Dance
and Polk’s of
Lives
, Levertov puts her finger on essential qualities in Munro’s work:
    But