Alice Munro
Alice Munro is one of the few Canadian authors who have established reputations for themselves within the borders of the country and outside the country. Alice Munro was born on 10th July 1931 in Canada, and she established herself as a short story writer, which saw her win the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2013. Almost all the stories by Alice Munro a fiction feature, which is contributed to her strong regional focus. Munro’s stories are more informative and interesting because of their nature to single out and address most of the problems in the present world. The characters used by Alice Munro in most of her short stories tend to condemn strong customs practiced by various communities in the world. The female characters tend to be more complex while the male characters possess all the necessary traits of men in the community. In her early work, Alice Munro used characters who showed the dilemmas of a growing young girl about love and marriage matters. AS Munro grew to a woman, she shifted her stories and focused on middle age and the elderly alone. Therefore, the ability to change her story with her age enables Munro to have adequate experience of the things her target groups are going through hence making her work more informative.
Dance of the happy shades by Alice Munro was published in the year 1968, and the style used in the story meant Alice Munro to win the Governors General’s Award in the same year (Cox,2015). The award was Canada’s highest literacy price. Dance of the happy shades by Munro revealed that Munro’s vision of the novel leaned towards a sequence of separately-titled and interrelated chapters opposite to many novelists who focus on the length of their story. The title story of Dance of the Happy Shades’ is narrated by a teenage girl whose piano teacher is hosting a piano recital performed by her students and tolerated by their parents. A handicapped child from Greenhill school performs a piece of music called ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’ and the parents argues that the child has great talent, but her talent has been wasted due to her handicap. Miss Marseilles, the piano teacher, disagrees with the parents and insists that the child is capable and gifted. The story of Dance of the Happy Shades is preferred because of her ability to use characters and plots that are authentic. From the story, Munro acknowledges the existence of both good and evil in society and their inevitable consequences.
Another works by Alice Munro include, Live of Girls and Women in 1971 (Gale,2016), Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You in 1974 (Thacker,2018), The Beggar Maid in 1980 (Signh,2018), and The Moons Jupiter in 1982 (Ramya,2018). All these stories by Alice Munro cover a specific aspect of life in a short period. The stories by Alice Munro discusses some freedoms for women, which have been forbidden in the community. The female characters used by Munro in her stories explore life without gender constraints. Munro’s novels have been praised because of her ability to create warmth and familiarity in the manner she connects her ideas, and hence Munro’s stories are one of the most interesting to read.