10 short story collections by Alice Munro that chronicle the woman experience

1. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968): Munro’s first collection of short stories, it was published when she was 37. A housewife and mother of four children, one of whom had died in infancy, she would sneak in writing around naps and housework. The collection introduces readers to Munro’s distinct narrative style. In these fifteen short stories, Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. The stories are set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario. These stories were described by the publisher as “luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.” Critics praised the volume for its virtuosity and for Munro’s elemental command, “incisive like a diamond”. It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro’s stories,” read a review in the Wall Street Journal. Highlights include ‘Boys and Girls,’ a coming-of-age story that challenges gender roles (the narrator is a young girl trying to find her place in the mid-20^th century Canada), and the titular story, ‘Dance of the Happy Shades,’ which centres on people who are othered by their society.

2. Lives of Girls and Women (1971): Although it was described and marketed as “the only novel by Munro”, it resembles a collection of interlinked coming-of-age stories in form, with discrete chapters narrated by the main character, Del Jordan/ Through unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. It is a Bildungsroman that traces Del’s youth and education — both formal and informal, both spiritual and carnal. Del and her mother spend their summers in the town of Jubilee, where the former learns of her mother’s own humble childhood and is made aware that her mother is the victim of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle, Bill. Later in the second section, Bill pays a visit to Del and Addie, a visit that forever changes the way Del views her town.

3. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974): Munro’s second collection further cemented her reputation as a master of the short story form. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You — a collection of 13 stories, delves into love, loss, and identity. The stories span different generations and social classes. Notable stories include ‘Material,’ which explores the tension between desire and social expectations, and ‘Tell Me Yes or No,’ a poignant exploration of the consequences of infidelity. In this collection, too, Munro demonstrates her precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique. John Updike compared her to Chekhov. The women in these stories contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future. Munro makes their lives shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation.

4. The Progress of Love (1986): In this collection of 12 complex and multi-layered stories, Munro explores varieties and degrees of love — filial, platonic and sexual. We meet a divorced woman, who returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The fragility of the trust between children and parents is revealed in a story that dwells on the accidental near-drowning of a child. The last story, ‘White Dump’, focuses on a shared memory of three women. In these stories, Munro proved, once again, that she was a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of her times. “Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love,” reads the blurb of the book.

5. Friend of My Youth (1990): The ten stories in this collection astonish and delight us in equal measure. They convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. We meet a woman, who is haunted by dreams of her dead mother. And an adulterous couple who discover how the initial excitement gives way to pain. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past stumbles upon unsettling truths about a total stranger instead. The collection explores themes of memory, regret, and the passage of time, as characters confront the ghosts of their pasts and grapple with the burden of relationships. Munro’s prose is both evocative and incisive, capturing the nuances of emotion with precision and depth. Notable stories include ‘Meneseteung,’ a haunting exploration of a woman’s life through the lens of local history, and ‘Friend of My Youth,’ which examines the enduring bonds of friendship across decades.

6. The Love of a Good Woman (1998): The eight stories of this collection deal with Munro’s great themes: secrets, love, betrayal, and the stuff of ordinary lives. In fact, she extends and magnifies these themes. In these stories about vagaries of love, Munro details the strange and comical desires of the human heart. The characters’ passion leads them down unexpected paths. In some stories, time seems to stretch out: we meet a man and a woman who look back 40 years to the precise summer they met: the summer, we discover, when the true nature of their lives was revealed. A young girl finds that the mother she adores will not sustain her — she must count on herself. In the title story, the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus. These stories, steeped in a strong sense of life, extend the limits of fiction.

7. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (2002): In these nine stories that make up this collection, Munro conjures up characters “as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves”. These stories loop and swerve, like memory. They show how tirelessly observant and gloriously humane Munro as a writer was. A strong-minded housekeeper just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood finds her fate unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenage girl’s practical joke. A college student, who visits her aunt for the first time and recognizes the family furniture, stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. We also meet a young cancer patient who discovers a perfect bridge to regain her future. A woman realizes how the memory of an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.

8. Runaway (2004): Perhaps one of Munro’s most celebrated collections, the eight stories in Runaway are about love and its infinite betrayals. The titular story is about a young woman who refuses a chance to escape a bad marriage. In another story, ‘Passion,’ a country girl, who works at a resort hotel, discovers the limits and lies of the mysterious emotion — passion. Three stories are about a woman named Juliet. In the first, she leaves teaching at a girls’ school for a wild and irresistible love match; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine, and in the last Juliet’s child vanishes into an unexplained silence. In the final story, ‘Powers,’ a young woman who can read the future sets off a chain of events that leads her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.

9. Too Much Happiness (2009): In this compilation of 10 stories, Munro shines light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives. In the first story, a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. The long title story is a fictional retelling of the life of the 19th century Russian mathematician and writer Sofia Kovalevskaya. Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories with ease, which makes Too Much Happiness a compelling collection.

10. Dear Life (2012): Like most of her collections mentioned above, the stories in Dear Life examine sex, love, and death. Four of these stories can be seen as fictionalised autobiographies that chronicle the aging Munro’s feelings about her life. In an interview, Munro said that Dear Life, her 14th collection, would be her last. Subsequently, she issued several compilations of previously published stories, which include Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995–2014 (2014). The cast of characters we meet in this collection are all familiar. A poet finds herself in alien territory at her first literary party; she is rescued by a newspaper columnist, and soon hurtles across the continent, her young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A girl, who can’t sleep, imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.