Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

its title in Canada, saying that it “appears here under the less happy title of
The Beggar Maid
and in a vulgar pictorial wrapper. But it is important not to be put off: it is a work of great brilliance and depth.” For him, “Munro’s power of analysis, of sensations and thoughts, is almost Proustian in its sureness, and though her forms are scrupulously small, she accumulates an extremely moving sense of the
length
of life.” He noted also that “the fragmented structure of the book offers a sophisticated metaphor for the mind’s preferred habit of seeing life in fictionally distinct episodes.” Another reviewer called
The Beggar Maid
a “gentle, observant book – we should hear a lot more from Alice Munro in the future.” Marsaili Cameron, in the
Gay News
, wrote that “tales of past and present are interwoven with immense skill in this book; it combines literary virtuosity, wit and searing insights.” In
Blackwood’s Magazine
, Andrew Lothian wrote that Munro “tells her story vividly and economically, subtly varying her style of narrative to suit her characters’ changing circumstances. This is a work of sharply accurate observation, often funny, always affecting – in the end a convincing portrait of a contemporary woman.”
    About the only negative voice was that of Eva Tucker in the
Hampstead and Highgate Express
, who wrote that it was a surprise to herthat
The Beggar Maid
“has got on to the short list” for the Booker-McConnell prize for the best novel of the year. Tucker summarizes the book and concludes, “When Rose makes it to college and attracts the attentions of a well-heeled young man, the novel deteriorates into provincial dreariness.” Tucker’s condescending view notwithstanding, the Booker nomination was probably the best indication of how the book really did in Great Britain. Judges for the prize were charged to come up with a list of five finalists but they were unable to agree, so they accepted a list with seven titles –
The Beggar Maid
was one of those contending for the final spots on the list. The real competition that year was between Anthony Burgess’s
Early Powers
and William Golding’s
Rites of Passage
. Golding’s book won, but Munro’s having been a finalist at all was tribute enough –
The Beggar Maid
, as it turned out, came in fourth. As story collections, none of her subsequent books has been eligible for the Booker Prize since then. Notwithstanding the nomination, sales of the Allen Lane hardback were disappointing (1,300) though the paperback did well enough (11,000 – both by April 1982).

    When
The McGregors
by Robert Laidlaw was published it was reviewed by Timothy Findley, another Ontarian whose writing sharply defined his own deeply felt cultural inheritances. Offering an appreciative analysis of Laidlaw’s book, he begins his concluding paragraph writing,
    In one of Alice Munro’s best stories, Home, there is, I think, the most graceful and tactful evocation ever put on paper of how the generations part from one another. Sadly, ineluctably, with all the knives “so carefully applied” but so incisively wielded, a daughter deserts her ailing father and his second wife and the scene of her childhood. She abandons all three – even the place – to their integrity and goes away to claim her own. As an elegy in prose, it is beyond compare. I do hope Robert Laidlaw, now dead, had lived to read that story; in it, through fiction, his daughter makes her break with the past that is implicit in her father’s book without destroying that past.
    Writing in 1979, Findley had no way of knowing what Munro would produce in the years to come. “Home,” it turned out, is really more of a preamble to her actual incomparable “elegy in prose” for her father, “Working for a Living.” She was working on that elegy herself just as Findley was reviewing her father’s novel. And though “Home” may have looked to Findley as if Munro was engaging in some act of desertion or rejection, nothing could be further from the truth. “Home” was not desertion, “Home” was an affirmation of the complex personal and cultural connections embodied by that word. In October 1973, when its events occurred, “Home” was staring Munro full in the face with a power really only felt by a returned native. Writing “Home” that month, Alice Munro embarked on an imaginative journey that took her ever more deeply into the cultural inheritances of her home place.