The Love of a Good Woman

by Alice Munro

Overview

In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes - the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met - the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her - she must count on herself. Some choices are made - in a will, in a decision to leave home - with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted; when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780099287865
Publisher:	Knopf Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/28/2000
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and two volumes of Selected Stories. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron. 

Hometown:

Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia

Date of Birth:

July 10, 1931

Place of Birth:

Wingham, Ontario, Canada

Education:

University of Western Ontario (no degree)

Read an Excerpt

Sonje was not the sort of friend who would tell you that she was trying to have a baby and how long she'd been trying and what techniques she was using. She never talked about sex in that way, or about her periods or any behavior of her body--though she soon told Kath things that most people would consider much more shocking. She had a graceful dignity--she had wanted to be a ballet dancer until she got too tall, and she didn't stop regretting that until she met Cottar, who said, "Oh, another little bourgeois girl hoping she'll turn into a dying swan." Her face was broad, calm, pink skinned--she never wore any makeup, Cottar was against makeup--and her thick fair hair was pinned up in a bushy chignon. Kath thought she was wonderful looking--both seraphic and intelligent.

Eating their French fries on the beach, Kath and Sonje discuss characters in the stories they've been reading. How is it that no woman could love Stanley Burnell? What is it about Stanley? He is such a boy, with his pushy love, his greed at the table, his self-satisfaction. Whereas Jonathan Trout--oh, Stanley's wife, Linda, should have married Jonathan Trout, Jonathan who glided through the water while Stanley splashed and snorted. "Greetings, my celestial peach blossom," says Jonathan in his velvety bass voice. He is full of irony, he is subtle and weary. "The shortness of life, the shortness of life," he says. And Stanley's brash world crumbles, discredited.

Something bothers Kath. She can't mention it or think about it. Is Kent something like Stanley?

One day they have an argument. Kath and Sonje have an unexpected and disturbing argument about a story by D. H. Lawrence. The story is called"The Fox."

At the end of that story the lovers--a soldier and a woman named March--are sitting on the sea cliffs looking out on the Atlantic, towards their future home in Canada. They are going to leave England, to start a new life. They are committed to each other, but they are not truly happy. Not yet.

The soldier knows that they will not be truly happy until the woman gives her life over to him, in a way that she has not done so far. March is still struggling against him, to hold herself separate from him, she is making them both obscurely miserable by her efforts to hang on to her woman's soul, her woman's mind. She must stop this--she must stop thinking and stop wanting and let her consciousness go under, until it is submerged in his. Like the reeds that wave below the surface of the water. Look down, look down--see how the reeds wave in the water, they are alive but they never break the surface. And that is how her female nature must live within his male nature. Then she will be happy and he will be strong and content. Then they will have achieved a true marriage.

Kath says that she thinks this is stupid.

She begins to make her case. "He's talking about sex, right?"

"Not just," says Sonje. "About their whole life."

"Yes, but sex. Sex leads to getting pregnant. I mean in the normal course of events. So March has a baby. She probably has more than one. And she has to look after them. How can you do that if your mind is waving around under the surface of the sea?"

"That's taking it very literally," says Sonje in a slightly superior tone.

"You can either have thoughts and make decisions or you can't," says Kath. "For instance--the baby is going to pick up a razor blade. What do you do? Do you just say, Oh, I think I'll just float around here till my husband comes home and he can make up his mind, that is our mind, about whether this is a good idea?"

Sonje said, "That's taking it to extremes."

Each of their voices has hardened. Kath is brisk and scornful, Sonje grave and stubborn.

"Lawrence didn't want to have children," Kath says. "He was jealous of the ones Frieda had from being married before."

Sonje is looking down between her knees, letting sand fall through her fingers. "I just think it would be beautiful," she says. "I think it would be beautiful, if a woman could."

Kath knows that something has gone wrong. Something is wrong with her own argument. Why is she so angry and excited? And why did she shift over to talking about babies, about children? Because she has a baby and Sonje doesn't? Did she say that about Lawrence and Frieda because she suspects that it is partly the same story with Cottar and Sonje?

When you make the argument on the basis of the children, about the woman having to look after the children, you're in the clear. You can't be blamed. But when Kath does that she is covering up. She can't stand that part about the reeds and the water, she feels bloated and suffocated with incoherent protest. So it is herself she is thinking of, not of any children. She herself is the very woman that Lawrence is railing about. And she can't reveal that straight out because it might make Sonje suspect--it might make Kath herself suspect--an impoverishment in Kath's life.

Sonje who has said, during another alarming conversation, "My happiness depends on Cottar."

My happiness depends on Cottar.

That statement shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn't want it to be true of herself.

But she didn't want Sonje to think that she was a woman who had missed out on love. Who had not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Ozick

She is our Chekhov.

Alice Munro

Some stories in the collection are aboiut what Ms. Munro calls 'a new kind of old woman, women who grew up under one set of rules and then found they could live with another. . . .We associate old women with conventional sexual morality. . . . [But] "a lot of women lived more risky lives than their daughters. You take the risk of being lonely."
— Interviewed in The New York Times, November 30, 1998

Reading Group Guide

1. In the first story, "The Love of a Good Woman, " how has the town of Jutland, its way of life and its mores, affected Enid's character and desires and helped to mold her into the person she is? What does she want from life and what compromises has she made? Does she believe Mrs. Quinn's tale of murder? If so, does it make Rupert more, or less, attractive to her? What exactly does she want from Rupert?

2. What does the author accomplish by dividing "Jakarta" into two parts--the distant past and the present? In what essential way do the two marriages (Kath and Kent; Sonje and Cottar) differ? How are Kath's and Sonje's different attitudes to marriage borne out in the subsequent courses of their lives? Might Sonje's conviction that Cottar is still alive be true, or is it merely an attempt to hold on to a remnant of her former happiness?

3. In "Cortes Island, " why did the narrator and her husband decide to marry, and how does the marriage evolve? Does the author imply that the same evolution occurs in many, or most, marriages? What sort of reflection do the Gorries and their rather grotesque marriage and menage cast upon that of their young lodgers? Why does Mr. Gorrie want the narrator to know about his past? Why is Mr. Gorrie, rather than any other man, featured in the narrator's erotic dreams? How does the narrator's sense of self change over the course of her story?

4. In what ways are Eve and Sophie in "Save the Reaper" similar in character, and in what ways are they different? Would you say that Sophie, either consciously or unconsciously, has modeled her life on her mother's? If so, is the situation changing? Why does Eve, in spite of her obvious fears, givethe vagrant girl directions to her house? What might the title of the story (a quotation from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shallott") signify?

5. How does Pauline, in "The Children Stay, " perceive marriage and family life? Does the author imply that the pretenses and the feeling of imprisonment that Pauline experiences are present, to some degree, in every marriage? Is the "bleakness" Pauline senses in herself and her father-in-law due to their situations, or their characters? Pauline says at the end that Jeffrey was not Orphée. Is she being honest? In what ways does "The Children Stay" echo or parallel the story of Orpheus and Eurydice? What role does the idea of fate play for the various characters?

6. How does Karin in "Rich As Stink" perceive the dynamic between Rosemary, Derek and Ann? How closely does her perception correspond with the reality? Would you agree with Karin that Derek has "given up on" both Rosemary and Ann (p. 236)? How much has Rosemary's wealth to do with her acceptance by Derek and Ann? Why doesn't Ann want Derek to see Karin in her wedding dress, and why is Karin determined to wear it to the dinner party? What sort of future do you envision for Rosemary? For Karin?

7. In "Before the Change, " what do the narrator's experiences at home with her father tell her about her relationship with Robin, its illusions, and its unhappy end? Robin differentiates "ideas" and "life"; is he being cynical or simply realistic? How are the narrator's beliefs about abortion and parenthood affected by her own mother's death in childbirth, and how are these beliefs modified during the course of the story? How do her ideas about love, too, undergo changes? Might she have made different decisions about her love affair and pregnancy if she had it to do over again?

8. In "My Mother's Dream, " what has the dream, described at the beginning of the story, to do with Jill's actual life and experiences? Has she known what it is to "leave" a baby? What relation does Jill's struggle with the baby have to her struggle with George's family and his memory? Would you say that this mother-child struggle is a universal one, extreme though it is in Jill's case?

Editorial Reviews

Munro's austere and magisterial stories of lust and loss are, if anything, more enigmatic than ever, and yet their opacity occasionally gestures toward something akin to hope.

New Yorker

With these eight extraordinary stories, Munro once again demonstrates what fiction — when shaped, burnished, and not held in check — can impart about the secret conspiracies of the heart.
— Bookforum

Jill Ciment

It's Munro quality, not quantity, that puts her in the company of today's most accomplished writers of fiction at any length....Munro breaks the silence [with The Love of a Good Woman, but without devaluing the style. Not many writers can pull this off. It takes a balance of compassion and detachment worthy of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.
— Time Magazine

R.Z. Sheppard

Fans...will find familiar rewards...the same rich language, the same casually brilliant insights....These stories are like a flock of birds in flight....amazing....On the surface, they seem almost artless, meandering and random, cluttered with detail. But they haunt you.
— The Women's Review of Books

Barbara Croft

Munro delivers uncanny insights into relationships and why people often make such unusual choices in life.
—Entertainment Weekly

William Stevenson

...[J]ewellike stories...

People Magazine

...[U]nrivaled clarity and subtlety....Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers "for grown-up people." The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.
— The New York Times Book Review

Michael Gorra

. . .[A] riveting collection...a lovely book.

San Francisco Chronicle

A writer for the ages.
—Newsday

Dan Cryer

A triumph. Certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov.
— Mirabella

Carol Shields

These astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform.
— Elle

Francine Prose

Alice Munro is indisputably a master. . . .Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception. . .Her imagination is fearless. . .A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.
— Washington Post Book World

Greg Varner

...[U]nrivaled clarity and subtlety....Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers "for grown-up people." The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.
— The New York Times Book Review

Michael Gorra

Superlative. . .She distills a novel's worth of dramatic events into a story of 20 pages.
— Time Out

Erik Huber

Munro's ninth book (after her recent triumphs Friend of My Youth and Open Secrets) contains eight long stories that resemble Munro's mature work in their tendency toward leisurely development and complex narrative. As always, their province is both the author's native Ontario and the experiential territory denoted by the title of an earlier volume, Lives of Girls and Women. The inchoate understanding possessed by husbands and wives whose intimacies never fully accommodate their unshared histories, siblings who have inevitably endured (or imagined) imbalance and unfairness, parents and children unhinged by the emotional variations to which their one flesh is susceptible — all are central to these elaborately woven tales of people's disillusioning plunges into the depths of their own and others' lives. But this time around the stories seem overloaded, distended by successive disclosures that move us unconvincingly away from their thematic and structural centers. In 'Save the Reaper,' for instance, essential details about its characters' relationships are withheld for so long that we never empathize sufficiently with the harried, lonely grandmother whose momentary impulsiveness endangers her family and herself. 'My Mother's Dream' reimagines from a daughter's perspective — and in almost ludicrously melodramatic terms — her mother's ordeal among her late husband's controlling family. 'The Children Stay' overemphatically delineates the moral unraveling of an adulterous wife who unwisely makes 'the choice of fantasy.' To be fair, a few of the stories are, even by Munro's high standards, exemplary: notably 'Cortes Island,' in which a bored housewife'svivid imagination may or may not have exaggerated incriminating facts about her odd landlords; and especially the fine title novella, about the death of a small-town optometrist, the extremities to which well-meaning ordinary people are driven, and the burden helplessly shouldered by a 'practical nurse' (there's a lovely irony therein) caught between 'Trying to ease people. Trying to be good' and telling what she wishes not to know. A mixed bag, then, through which we too often sense Munro straining to extend and intensify her stories. The unfortunate result is her weakest book yet.

Kirkus Reviews

Superb . . . Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers ‘for grown-up people.’ The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.”—Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review

“A writer for the ages.”—Dan Cryer, Newsday

“Alice Munro is indisputably a master. Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception. . . . Her imagination is fearless. . . . A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.”—Greg Varner, Washington Post Book World

“A riveting collection . . . a lovely book. Munro’s stories move through the years with a sneaky grace.”—Georgia Jones-Davis, San Francisco Chronicle

“A triumph . . . certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov.”—Carol Shields, Mirabella

“Superlative . . . [Munro] distills a novel’s worth of dramatic events into a story of twenty pages.”—Erik Huber, Time Out

“These astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform.”—Francine Prose, Elle

From the Publisher