Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

have taken the trade. Another story from this time, “Jakarta,” was published in
Saturday Night
and drew press attention in Canada since it was Munro’s first appearance in a Canadian magazine since 1982. A reviewer for the
Globe and Mail
wrote that “it’s awfully nice to see Munro’s mild-mannered Canadian misfits in
The New Yorker
. But it’s even better to read a Munro story, with characters one can relate to, set against a Canadian background, in a Canadian magazine.” Nationalist celebrating aside, the availability of “Jakarta” to
Saturday Night
meant that the
New Yorker
had passed on it. Still, despite the problems Munro experienced under Brown’s editorship, the magazine published five of the eight stories included in
Love
. One, “Cortes Island,” varied from longstanding
New Yorker
practice by appearing after the book had been published while another, “Before the Change,” barely preceded it. Two stories, “Rich as Stink” and “My Mother’s Dream,” had their first publication in the book. 12
    Probably more than any other single story Munro had written, “The Love of a Good Woman” had an almost immediate effect. That the
New Yorker
found the pages necessary for a story of its length – over seventy pages in straight type, often called a novella – was worth remarking, but beyond that, readers and critics immediately saw it as a
tour de force
. It was selected for an O. Henry Prize (the first year Canadians were eligible), and critical articles on the story began appearing almost immediately. When it appeared in the O. Henry Prize volume, Munro described its beginnings:
    What did I know about this story? A man and woman disposing of her lover’s body. This happened on an island off the B.C. coast – they put him in his own boat and towed him out into open water (into Desolation Sound, actually, which is a bit too much for a story). The sudden switch from sex to murder to marital cooperation seemed to me one of those marvelous, unlikely, acrobatic pieces of human behavior. The lover got transferred into a car, and it all went on in Huron County, andthe boys got into it, and their families, and Enid, who took over the story as insistently as she took over a sickroom. And there is the boat, still, waiting by the bank of Maitland River.
    Tellingly, Munro makes no effort here to disguise the identity of her home place. In the story, too, details resonate wonderfully without achieving clear meaning: The murdered man, Mr. Willens, bears the same name as the lothario in Alice Laidlaw’s second published story, “Story for Sunday”; “Love” takes place during the same spring and summer that Alice Laidlaw left university, worked in the tobacco fields, and prepared to marry James Munro; and finally, its putative adulterer, Jeannette Quinn, dies on Alice Laidlaw’s twentieth birthday.
    More than this, “Love” is connected to “Cortes Island,” the third story in the collection, which begins “Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds, but some people – Chess’s boss’s wife, and the older secretary in his office, and Mrs. Gorrie upstairs, referred to me as a little bride. Our little bride, sometimes. Chess and I made a joke of it, but his public reaction was a look fond and cherishing. Mine was a pouty smile – bashful, acquiescent.” Here, Munro was describing herself and her own situation in 1952 – this “little bride” writes (“filling page after page with failure”) while her husband is at work, and lives on Arbutus Street in Vancouver looking out at English Bay. Autobiographical connections abound throughout the stories in
The Love of a Good Woman
, though, as Munro casually said in her contributor’s note about “Love,” “it all went on in Huron County” – she marshalled the facts and situations she needed to create the image and action she was after, and used them to great effect.
    As usual, McClelland & Stewart and Knopf each printed its own edition of
The Love of a Good Woman
from the Knopf typesetting. The book was set during May and, judging by the proofs available in the Calgary archives, Munro made a considerable number of changes throughout the first pass. (Although some stories were set from
New Yorker
pages, “The Children Stay” was set from a typescript dated“February 21/98” by Munro – after the story had been in the magazine,