I agree with what you say about Alice Munro. Whatever her shortcomings as a person, and the reason for them, she was a brilliant writer whose stories will resonate through the years.
I'm trying to steelman the opposite argument and understand how the other side thinks about it. It would go something like this: she wrote fiction that tells the truth about women's lives, in which women find ways out of entrapments, test freedom for the first time, blunder on, begin to be autonomously sexual and should not be punished for it? So this mother-daughter betrayal stings particularly bad? I think she is being put in the feminist fiction tradition, but she was born 1931. That's the Margaret Laurence and Mavis Gallant and Anita Brookner generation.
It's the sisterly-solidarity test, I think. And standing by your man like he's the most important thing in the world. Choosing your man over your daughter.
That's the idea, I think.
But we probably don't know the whole truth there. Andrea came out well after everyone who can defend themselves was dead, and we only have her side. For many people that's enough.
I agree with what you say about Alice Munro. Whatever her shortcomings as a person, and the reason for them, she was a brilliant writer whose stories will resonate through the years.
I'm trying to steelman the opposite argument and understand how the other side thinks about it. It would go something like this: she wrote fiction that tells the truth about women's lives, in which women find ways out of entrapments, test freedom for the first time, blunder on, begin to be autonomously sexual and should not be punished for it? So this mother-daughter betrayal stings particularly bad? I think she is being put in the feminist fiction tradition, but she was born 1931. That's the Margaret Laurence and Mavis Gallant and Anita Brookner generation.
It's the sisterly-solidarity test, I think. And standing by your man like he's the most important thing in the world. Choosing your man over your daughter.
That's the idea, I think.
But we probably don't know the whole truth there. Andrea came out well after everyone who can defend themselves was dead, and we only have her side. For many people that's enough.