As someone who was born and raised within an hour of Alice Munro's home for most of her life, from which she did most of her writing, namely a modest bungalow in Clinton, ON, I've always wondered what people elsewhere make of her writing. To me, she's always seemed a very local writer. I've long felt that she captured the stolidness and secret strangeness in the settler people here. Lives of Girls and Women is in my opinion her masterpiece. Interestingly, Margaret Atwood argues that it's actually a novel rather than a collection of short stories, reasoning that there's more to connect them than just their shared setting in the fictional county of Jubilee, which is based on the real-life Huron County, of which Clinton is one of the more substantial towns. Maybe that's why it's my favourite of her books.
Hmm. That sounds very intriguing. Thank you for awakening me to it. Yes. I agree. Their "Canadianness" was probably my favorite part but I grew up amongst very stolid New England stock. So many of the characters feel enough familiar that they make sense. Hardship and difficulty are, of course, universal.
As someone who was born and raised within an hour of Alice Munro's home for most of her life, from which she did most of her writing, namely a modest bungalow in Clinton, ON, I've always wondered what people elsewhere make of her writing. To me, she's always seemed a very local writer. I've long felt that she captured the stolidness and secret strangeness in the settler people here. Lives of Girls and Women is in my opinion her masterpiece. Interestingly, Margaret Atwood argues that it's actually a novel rather than a collection of short stories, reasoning that there's more to connect them than just their shared setting in the fictional county of Jubilee, which is based on the real-life Huron County, of which Clinton is one of the more substantial towns. Maybe that's why it's my favourite of her books.
Hmm. That sounds very intriguing. Thank you for awakening me to it. Yes. I agree. Their "Canadianness" was probably my favorite part but I grew up amongst very stolid New England stock. So many of the characters feel enough familiar that they make sense. Hardship and difficulty are, of course, universal.