Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

England wants them; I want them”) and more copies of the Canadian edition of the book. “And there’s Alice, about to be swept away by a prize to Australia. She needs time to
write
. Tell people to leave her alone.” Barber here is characteristically both light-hearted and serious.
Who
had created a notable fuss around Munro in Canada that was quite evidently growing, something Barber could only delight in; at the same time, she realizedthat such activities were keeping her writer from the writing time she needed. Munro’s trip to Australia – arranged as part of the Canada-Australia prize she had won the year before – took her away from March 5 to 30, 1979, for a round of meetings, discussions, dinners, and interviews. She was, however, back home in time to accept the Governor General’s Award in Ottawa on April 4 from Governor General Edward Schreyer. During April Robert Laidlaw’s
The McGregors: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family
, with an introduction by Harry Boyle, was published by Macmillan. Too late, though, for Mary Etta Laidlaw, who died in February. Although there was no author to promote it, Laidlaw’s book was widely reviewed and praised. Munro’s “The Stone in the Field” appeared in the April 1979 issue of
Saturday Night;
after it did, that story won the McClelland & Stewart Award for Fiction, a National Magazine Award. As 1979 progressed and Alfred A. Knopf prepared to publish its
The Beggar Maid
that September, and Allen Lane its edition in the United Kingdom the following April, Munro’s writing was reaching out to an ever-widening audience. 39
    When Close wrote to Munro explaining her preference for
The Beggar Maid
title over
Who Do You Think You Are?
she noted the difference between the two national markets. She wrote that Macmillan’s choice with its recognizable image on the jacket is “a little sassy,” that “it hit just the right note of national pride and recognition. Here we need to establish you as a Canadian, yes, but mainly as a writer of distinction.” Establishing writers in just this way was what Alfred A. Knopf – the publisher who had founded the company in 1915 – was about, the literary trade publishing of well-made books by distinctive writers. He had done as much with numerous writers himself, among them one of Munro’s admitted influences, Willa Cather, and the house still saw this project as its mandate. Not surprisingly, then,
The Stories of John Cheever
was a Knopf book, and Close sent Munro a copy of it when she sent this letter. Thanking Close and agreeing to
The Beggar Maid
as her title in the United States, Munro called the Cheever book “the very thing I most wanted.” David Williamson was right to connect Cheever’s book with Munro’s in his
Winnipeg Free Press
review: writers of distinction, and writers from the
New Yorker
.
    Part of Knopf’s introductory strategy involved manufacturing and producing its own version of Munro’s text, making a book in keeping with the firm’s historically meticulous methods. Hence, Gibson’s hope that Knopf’s book be the same as Macmillan’s went nowhere. Knopf did, though, cut up a copy of
Who
to use for typesetting. While such matters lie mainly within the realm of editorial scholarship, such a fact is significant in that, along with the work done on the book by Norton, Knopf’s decision to reset the book allowed Munro a chance to revisit her material one more time. While most of the textual differences between
Who
and
The Beggar Maid
are syntactical and stylistic, there are some that go further. “Providence,” for example, has a different ending in each book.
    Knopf had inherited the preliminary work on the cover that Norton had done with the Edward Burne-Jones painting mentioned by Patrick to Rose in “The Beggar Maid” (there the girl was “meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet. The milky surrender of her, the helplessness and gratitude”). They decided to use it,
King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
, on the jacket, giving the book a subdued, medieval look, implying a chivalrous romance. One American reviewer confessed to being misled by this cover; seeking “a lurid bodice-ripper or two,” she rummaged through the paper’s rejected review copies looking for “a deliberate retreat from reality.” With
The Beggar Maid
, though “prepared for blood-and-thunder romance,” she found herself reading “a marvelous book that had been wrongly rejected – victimized by its