Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

hopelessly romantic-looking cover.” A source of differentiation throughout Munro’s career has been the look of Knopf’s books as opposed to Gibson’s; it began with this first shared project and has continued since, though only on that first occasion did Munro’s American publishers opt for a different title. 40
    The Beggar Maid
was published by Knopf on September 28, 1979, with advance praise from John Gardner, Margaret Laurence, Ross Macdonald, and Joyce Carol Oates. In August, the
Kirkus Reviews
had pronounced it a “bountifully compassionate and moving book,” noting that some of its stories had been in the
New Yorker
. Julia O’Faolain, whose novel
No Country for Young Men
would be competing against
The
Beggar Maid
as finalist for the Booker Prize, wrote an advance review for the
New York Times Book Review
. She began with the Burne-Jones cover image, writing that Patrick is attracted to Rose as a romantic ideal, that as in the painting he sees in her “qualities she hasn’t got.” She also noted too that Munro’s “humor here is under restraint.… Deft with social detail, she anchors her people firmly to class and place and commands the classic realist’s strengths: moral seriousness, compassion, a sense of the particular.” In this book, Munro offered “the two great, mutually enhancing pleasures of fiction. The first is the sense that a writer has seen through the muddle of experience to an imminent significance and presented us with it: a conviction that things must be thus and not otherwise.” The second is that “an apparently conclusive truth may not be true after all.”
    Other reviews followed suit. In the
New Republic
, Jack Beatty wrote that “the impressive Canadian writer Alice Munro has combined the form of the short story with the narrative interest of the novel to provide an unusual kind of literary pleasure.” Like Noonan, he also wrote that “the look of turds frozen in piles of snow in the crumbling lavatory of Rose’s school” is one he will not forget. Beatty maintained that “everything in these stories is a mix of better and worse, of gain and loss, of misery and happiness. Moving, hard, lucid, they throw a ‘cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.’ ” Oates, whose review for
Mademoiselle
was published before the book’s appearance, calls it “a considerable accomplishment” and writes that its “technique is sometimes jarring, but often dramatically powerful.… [Rose] is drawn back obsessively to Hanratty, as if in pursuit of her own soul. But she doesn’t find it – the question once posed to her by an officious teacher, ‘who do you think you are?’ has no answer.”
    As it happened, Munro’s collection was published concurrently with Mavis Gallant’s
From the Fifteenth District
from Random House. As a result, the two Canadians were sometimes yoked together in reviews. Munro had blurbed Gallant’s book for Macmillan when it was published in Canada. Yet since American reviewers were scarcely able to say anything sensible about Canadian contexts, they usually looked to other matters. Ted Morgan, writing in the
Saturday Review
, differentiated in areview essay between “women writers” and “Writers Who Happen to Be Women,” as his title has it. Critiquing the feminism then current, he saw more in Gallant’s accomplishment, but of Munro’s Rose he wrote, aptly, “She is immensely likable, and there is gallantry in her willingness to take risks, open herself to the chance of love, and measure herself against what she was and fled from.” For Morgan, “Munro is as good as John Updike in chronicling the hesitations and sidesteps of adultery, its secret rules and regulations, its Geneva conventions, and the dozens of practical details that must be dealt with to make the grand passion possible.” Also noting Munro’s relation to ideological feminism, Thomas R. Edwards in the
New York Review of Books
writes that Rose’s “experiences are her own and no one else’s. For this, as well as for its quiet refusal ever to say more than is needed, Munro’s book seems to me very fine.”
    The stories in
The Beggar Maid
, Paul Wilner wrote in the
Village Voice
, “take on the deliberate air of fairy tales” and, like several other reviewers, he was drawn to a particular line from “Half a Grapefruit”: “We sweat for our pretensions.” Drawn particularly to “the incidental revelations of character and setting along the