Alice Munros Best

writerhood, says of her adolescence:
    It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his history, I would want to write things down.
    I would try to make lists. A list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them, a list of family names, names on the tombstones in the cemetery and any inscriptions underneath …
    The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy, heartbreaking.
    And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting.
    As a programme for a life’s work this is daunting. Nevertheless it’s a programme Alice Munro was to follow over the next thirty-five years with remarkable fidelity.

    Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw, in 1931, which means that she was a small child during the Depression. She was eight in 1939, the year Canada entered the Second World War, and she attended university—the University of Western Ontario, in London—in the postwar years. She was twenty-five and a young mother when Elvis Presley first became famous, and thirty-eight at the time of the flower-child revolution and the advent of the women’s movement in 1968–9, a moment in time that saw the publication of her first book. In 1981 she was fifty. Her stories are set mainly over these years—the ′30s to the ′80s—or even before then, in the time of ancestral memory.
    Her own ancestry was partly Scotch Presbyterian: she can trace her family back to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, friend of Robert Burnsand the Edinburgh literati of the late eighteenth century, and author of
The Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, which could itself be a Munro title. On the other side of the family there were Anglicans, for whom the worst sin is said to consist of using the wrong fork at dinner. Munro’s acute consciousness of social class, and of the minutiae and sneers separating one level from the next, is honestly come by, as is—from the Presbyterians—her characters’ habit of rigorously examining their own deeds, emotions, motives, and consciences, and finding them wanting. In a traditional Protestant culture, such as that of small-town Sowesto, forgiveness is not easily come by, punishments are frequent and harsh, potential humiliation and shame lurk around every corner, and nobody gets away with much.
    But this tradition also contains the doctrine of justification by faith alone: grace descends upon us without any action on our part. In Munro’s work, grace abounds, but it is strangely disguised: nothing can be predicted. Emotions erupt. Preconceptions crumble. Surprises proliferate. Astonishments leap out. Malicious acts can have positive consequences. Salvation arrives when least expected, and in peculiar forms.
    But as soon as you make such a pronouncement about Munro’s writing—or any other such analysis, inference, or generalization about it—you’re aware of that mocking commentator so often present in a Munro story—the one who says, in essence,
Who do you think you are? What gives you the right to think you know anything about me, or about anyone else for that matter?
Or, to quote from
Lives of Girls and Women
again, “People’s lives … were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” The key word here is “unfathomable.”

    The first two stories in this selection, “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid,” are from a book with two different titles. In Canada it was called—after a term of peevish accusation used to let the air out of somebody else’s puffed-up head—
Who Do You Think You Are?
In the United States and England it was called, romantically,
The Beggar Maid.
The stories in this enigmatically-titled book have a common protagonist—Rose, who grows up in a poorer section of a town called Hanratty with her father and her stepmother Flo, then goes to university on scholarship,marries a man from a social level far above hers and later runs away from him, and then, later still, becomes an actress—a cardinal sin and cause for shame in the Hanratty still inhabited by Flo.
Who Do You Think You Are?
is thus another
bildungsroman
—an account of the formation of its heroine—and another portrait of the artist.
    What is