Alice Munro’s story began in Wingham, Ontario, being born into a farm family during the depression of the 30’s. She has become one of the world’s greatest contemporary writers since first putting pen to paper around the age of fifteen (Dahlie 2); although she is not a prolific writer, her subject matter is immensely personal and telling of the unique world outside the major cities long ago. Perhaps no other work in her career is quite as obviously personal as 1971’s Lives of Girls and Women. Written when her twenty year marriage was falling apart (Ross 68), Lives is a passionate and introspective novel of young Del Jordan’s upbringing as a young woman of a farming family with aspirations to write her way to bigger and better things. Neil Bresner suggests that this is merely normal of any writer, and in Introducing Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women suggests that perhaps Lives is not an autobiography, but Munro’s ability as a writer that makes the reader believe so strongly in what she has written, that leads to the conclusion that it must be based in fact (12-13). Munro’s own life story though is seemingly mirrored by that of Del Jordan’s; both women “lived outside the whole social structure because [they] didn’t live in the town and [they] didn’t live in the country” (Dahlie 2), both were the children of fox-farming fathers and school-teacher mothers, and Munro’s success in the real world is implied to be the dream of Jordan’s. Del shares Munro’s same passion for losing herself amongst the books in the library, particularly gothic, and it seems it may be too coincidental that both draw on their surroundings and family for material for their novels. While Lives is not the only piece Munro’s life is reflected in; ‘Boys and Girls’, ‘The Ottawa Valley’ and ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ all share common characteristics, it is the novel in which the emotions of a young Munro’s dream for the future are most seen and felt by the reader.

   The similarities between Munro and Jordan are apparent from the beginning of Lives of Girls and Women; within the first ten pages of the novel Munro has characterized Del Jordan as a young girl who was “bloated and giddy with revelations of evil, of is versatility and grand invention and horrific playfulness” (5). She, like Munro, lived in a local that was “not part of town, but it was not part of the country either” (Munro 6), on a farm with her father who raised foxes. Hallavard Dahlie comments on Munro’s roots by saying that her writing is “tangibly rooted in the social realism of the rural and small-town world of her own experience, but it insistently explores what lies beyond the bounds of empirical reality” (5). This is very true of Del as well, who in ‘Epilogue: The Photographer’, begins to piece together her first novel using the people and places she has come to know. Del consciously “picked the Sherriff family to write about; what had happened to them isolated them, splendidly, doomed them to fiction” (Munro 240). This consciousness of the part of Del Jordan may be a manifestation of Munro’s own choices to write Del as she did in Lives; picking both a setting and a character she could relate to easily.

   In Lives it may be said that Del sees her world in terms the novels she reads, at one point referring to a farmer on his sleigh as “a helmeted Noresman” (Munro 100) after reading Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Del’s own fragmentary novel is kept running throughout a copy of Wuthering Heights, and exhibits a physical and psychological landscape that is reminiscent of the southern gothic, which ties to Munro’s acknowledged debt to authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty (Fowler 189-190). Growing up Munro immersed herself in novels by Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson and Emily Bronte, the later of which Jordan is mentioned as having a particular fondness for in the novel. Near the end of Lives, it is mentioned that there came a time for Del “when all the books in the library in the Town Hall were not enough for me” (Munro 240), a similar contrast to a memory of Munro’s, whose father was said to have read the complete Wingham Public Library (Valdes 84). The library is referenced once again, Del saying ‘I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds- this was a comfort to me” again contrasts the sanctuary that Munro found amongst novel while growing up, able to escape and imagine the world outside Wingham.

   ‘Princess Ida’ was the first chapter of Lives and Girls of Women that Munro penned; a section that “was first a story, then began growing into a novel” (Besner 52). The section explores Del Jordan’s mother, Addie Morrison, and the complex relationship between the two. Like Munro’s mother, Anne Ladilaw, who was once a schoolteacher in Alberta and then Ontario, Addie Morrison takes it upon herself to focus on her children during the depression when there was no work for her (Dahlie 1). After the depression, Morrison decides to sell Encyclopaedias, taking Del with her on many of her trips to the surrounding cities. In this enterprise Del’s job becomes one that she despises, reciting the names of the presidents, the capitals of South America, anything she can “rattle off” (Munro 66). Her distain for sharing this knowledge that her mother treasures and believes shouldn’t be “hid[den]… under a bushel out of perversity” (Munroe 67), is very much similar to Munro who said in an interview in 1973 she “can’t write if there’s another adult in the house… it must be that I’m still embarrassed about it somehow” (Ross 67).

   When Ladilaw fell ill in 1943 with Parkinson’s disease, their relationship changed, as did Addie and Del’s in Lives when Del recalls her mother’s stories of growing up. In both these cases, Munro and Jordan gain a deeper understanding of their mothers and where they come from. Before her death in 1959, Munro and her mother were able to come to a peaceful understanding about her line of work, Munro once saying “I remember someone in my family – not my husband, who was supportive of my writing- saying to me when I was about 31, “It’s time you recognized your limitations and quit this”. Although Munro’s mother was never against her becoming an author, she was always hesitantly cautious about her daughter’s description of the world (Hluchy). This relationship with her ailing mother would be profiled in ‘The Peace of Utrecht’, and in Munro’s ‘Winter Wind’, a particular passage stands out as a personal recounting of Munro’s childhood- “After all, it was I who heated tubs of water on the stove and hauled the washing machine from the porch and did the washing once a week; I who scrubbed the floor, and with an ill grace made her endless cups of tea” (Valdes 85). This affinity of Munro’s to detail mother/daughter relationships in her stories also extends appropriately to Lives of Girls and Women. For Del and Addie, their relationship turns when Del realizes the value of her mother’s personal life stories as the starting point for her fictional ones, but more importantly when Del begins to accept that her mother as the one who has instilled the importance of knowledge in her; Addie Morrison’s assertive personality and unfailing strength in times of hardship are both at odds and in sync with Del who eventually recognizes “I myself was not so different from my mother, but concealed it, knowing what dangers there were" (Munro 81).

   Munro’s pennant for using people from real-life situations is not limited strictly to her mother and herself, but instead encompasses the rest of her family, including her father. Aside from both Munro and Jordan being daughters to fox farming fathers, a characteristic also seen in 1968’s short story ‘Boys and Girls’ published in Dance of the Happy Shades, both fathers share the same stoic determinism to keep their family afloat during tough times. Munro’s father, Robert, set aside his fox farming to take on the night watchman position at the local foundry to supplement his new turkey farming endeavour, while Jordan’s father similarly puts aside his foxes to take up the same position Robert did. Both men took great pride in where they lived; for being neither in the town nor out in the country was just suitable enough- “He felt comfortable with the men from town, with any man who a shirt and tie to work, he could not help being wary, a little proud and apprehensive of insult” (Munro 8). It may even be said that Munro took her proud characterization of small-town life from her father, who before his death in 1976 wrote a novel entitled The McGregors: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family (Dahlie 1).

   Another telling connection between the two women is the simple fact that they are both Canadian and female. As Fowler points out ‘reality’ is a special problem for an author in rural Ontario, because ‘London’ must always be explained before anything else (191). There is a certain disconnection between where Munro and Jordan grew up and the rest of the world, allowing for the secular inspiration that comes through in Munro’s novels, and Jordan’s ideas. In this environment, both women grow and create in a way that they can eventually be pictured as the feminist counterparts, in life and in word, to Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (Martin 73). Lives of Girls and Women is defined by the characterization of Del as “a young girl- of exceptional intelligence and imagination- entering into a full human consciousness of herself in history and in space” (Martin 10). This connection finds Del parallel to Munro as a female writer, who also began to find herself at the same age through her dabbles in short stories and the imaginative world (Dahlie 2). Similarly, in the chapter ‘Changes in Ceremonies’, Del explicitly begins to enter the realm of romance and love. Here, as another woman, Munro has clearly drawn on her own experiences in romance and love, and most importantly heartbreak from the ending of her first marriage, to compose Del’s journey into true womanhood.

   The perception of each Munro and Jordan as females is another link binding the two together. Munro sums up the societal view of women in a passage where Del reads a psychiatry magazine, and it’s stated that if a boy and a girl look at a full moon: “the boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks ‘I must wash my hair’” (Munro 150). Both women are brought up in a society where “you do not call attention to yourself; you keep your head down, and get on with the job” (Cox 19). As Munro has shown in other works, there is a traditionally accepted role of women on the farm, and society then judges them on this basis. In Lives, Munro seems to have set out to change the way in which women are viewed, attempting to show them in a more positive, contemporary light. She writes Del Jordan in a way that is said to be reminiscent of Munro when she was growing up; both women were loners with aspirations and futures bigger than their small towns could handle. Del contemplates her future at the end of the novel with “I would get the scholarship which for years I and everybody else had been counting on, to carry me away from Jubilee” (Munro 245). The same sentiment is mirrored in Munro who was encouraged to apply for scholarships to university by a teacher who noted that Munro’s stories were “good enough to secure Munro a reputation among her teenybopper peers, who imagined her garnering fame with a “short short novel” called “Parkwater’s Passionate Pair”” (Valdes 86).

   Upon her completion of Lives and Girls and Women, Munro received a letter from her father, who wrote, “You will wonder of course if I ‘like it’. I don’t think it’s a case of liking it but more of accepting it as a fact of life. I suppose your book could be considered another weapon in the freeing of women from the cant and hypocrisy of the double standard” (Munro, S. 223). Beneath the words her father wrote is the acknowledgement that Munro has written a book that is extraordinarily personal; she has drawn on both her childhood and adulthood and subsequent life lessons that have come from both, and woven them into the only novel she has ever published. As her father stated, Munro has taken Lives of Girls and Women and chronicled within it the sometimes unpleasant, but always very honest moments of a young woman’s maturation. Munro has taken her small-town Ontario roots, her fox farming-father and passionate school teaching mother, and bestowed them upon Del Jordan in Lives. Both women share a love of novels, particularly gothic, and Jordan dreams of a life outside Jubilee where she may reach for the success Munro has found throughout her life. Lives of Girls and Women shows what Munro believes a young woman can be, but also what the young woman she once was; neither Munro nor Jordan fit into the societal stereotypes typical of their situations in life, each loses themselves in their writing and can arguably be counted as the female counterparts of Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (Martin 73). While Munro has written ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ to centre around her mother, she has still very convincingly drawn on the memory of Anne Ladilaw to craft Del Jordan’s mother, setting the young woman in similar mother-daughter misunderstanding, Del feeling “the weight of [her] mother’s eccentricities of something absurd and embarrassing about her” (Munro 64). Munro conveys her personal musings through Del’s contemplation about whether a girl may see the stars and be both mystified and want to wash her hair (Munro 150), and her views on romance and love through Del’s burgeoning female maturity. Perhaps the most meaningful connection between Munro and her counterpart in Live of Girls and Women is simply the admittance at the end of the novel that Del knowingly, and purposefully “picked the Sherriff family to write about” (Munro 240) when she began to compose her novel. The similarities between Munro and Jordan cannot be just coincidences; there are too many, too specific and far too personal to be ignored. Catherine Sheldrick Ross may put it best, that Del Jordan “captures Alice’s own adolescent excitement about writing”, and no matter what she claims, Del is a composite of everything Munro was and dreamt she could be.


Works Cited

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Cox, Ailsa. Alice Munro. Devon, United Kingdom: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2004.

Dahlie, Hallvard. Alice Munro and Her Works. Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 1984.

Fowler, Rowena. "The Art of Alice Munro: ‘The Beggar Maid’ and Lives of Girls and Women" Critique 25.4 (1984): 189-199. 04 02 2007:
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Munro, Sheila. Lives of mothers and daughters: growing up with Alice Munro. Toronto: M&S, 2001.

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 1992.

Martin, W. R. Alice Munro Paradox and Parallel. Ontario, Canada: The University of Alberta Press, 1987.

Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: writing her lives. 1. Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 2005.

Valdes, Marcela. "Some Stories Have to Be Told by Me." The Virginia Quarterly Review 82.3 Summer 2006: 82-90. 05 03 2007:
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