Alice Munro: should we still read a fallen saint?

“Having heroes is a dangerous business,” said Laura deCarufel in the Toronto Star. Until a few weeks ago, Alice Munro wasn’t just a great Canadian short-story writer, and a Nobel Prize winner.

To many of her readers, Munro, who died in her native Ontario in May this year, was seen almost as a literary saint. She was regarded as “the oracle of the unspoken female experience”: someone who saw everything, understood everything, and “forgave us, again and again”.

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She briefly left her husband, but then apparently accepted his explanation: that the nine-year-old was a “Lolita” who had “invaded” his bedroom for “sexual adventure”. Munro went back to him, and then insisted to her daughter that she had “been told too late”, and that what had happened was between Skinner and her stepfather. The two women became estranged. Even after Skinner reported him and he was convicted, Munro kept silent about it all.

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