When the Canadian Alice Munro, one of the world’s leading short-story writers and the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, died in June 2024, no one expected her illustrious life to be damned by a posthumous scandal. Her daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, claiming that Munro had poohpoohed her revelations of sexual abuse by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, standing by him even as he was convicted.
Skinner wrote in an essay titled, ‘My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him’, “She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ … she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men, She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”
Munro’s stories, set mostly in small-town Ontario, are full of what the British Council called “the stirring of the creative impulse, the bohemian rejection of provincial anonymity and conservatism, the refusal to be bound by narrow definitions of womanhood, and the complexity of female sexuality”. That her real life was antagonistic to her celebrated oeuvre “focused on women at different stages of their lives coping with complex desires”, as the NYT wrote in her obituary, is what has sent the literary world reeling.
Margaret Atwood called it “a bombshell” and said she was “shocked”. Joyce Carol Oates, five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, posted, “If you have read Munro’s fiction over the years, you will see how often terrible men are valorised, forgiven, enabled; there seems to be a sense of resignation.” Joyce Maynard posted that Skinner’s words “carry the unmistakable ring of truth,” but added, “I will not cease to admire—and study—the work of Alice Munro… There is art. And then there is the artist.”
Munro aficionados woke up to a feeling of having been duped. And, never far behind the juggernaut of deconstruction, the cancel culture, fattened on its own toxicity, exploded across the litverse.
But, oddly enough, most people across the world fulminating against Munro won’t have read Skinner’s essay: it is behind a paywall. Ergo, one of the most dismayingly significant literary events in recent times is being mediated by a media monopoly. People know of Skinner’s distress only via other sites. Fortunately for us, an earlier, abridged divulgation, ‘Andrea: To Heal Is Truth & Peace’, is available on The Gatehouse website.
The perplexity among the readers is as real as the culture sirening them to cancel Munro’s breathtaking corpus of 162 short stories. Many will, many will not. For a vast number of readers, Munro will be difficult to give up—her stories being relatable, flowing and layered. She is a rite of perpetual passage.
The negation has taken over the literature-driven sections of social media. It has revived regard-worsting memories of another icon, science fiction and fantasy writer Marion Zimmer Bradley, the feminist who was accused in June 2014 by her daughter Moira Greyland of incestuous paedophilia. Bradley had been dead since 1999, but the communitarian despair was unmediated by time. The sales of her books thinned, until a promise by the publisher of her digital backlist to donate all the income from her ebooks to the charity Save the Children stanched the bleed.
The genre exploded with readers’ nullifications and authorial repudiations. In July 2020, author Alexandra Rowland accused married writers Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear of abusing her—claims they staunchly denied. But the damage was done.
Critics have targeted Piers Anthony for misogyny and underage sexualisation in his works. (He does sometimes detail paedophilia in excruciating detail. Placing them in a fantasy paradigm does not grant them acceptability. For that way lies moral dodges.) This guilefulness clearly has its readers. Many of his books have appeared on the NYT bestsellers list.
Anthony responded to the criticism by claiming, in 2002, that while it has “been a number of years since I tried counting the ratio of fan letters I received, but when I did it ranged from something like 60-40 to 80-20 in favour of female, and I believe I still get more fe-mail than male-mail”. It’s all a bit hair-raising, this wilful blindness to and defence of misogyny in sword-and-sorcery myth-building.
The Munro disclosures have not only wrenched the focus back on older transgressors—such as Lewis Carroll and J M Barrie, and J P Lovecraft and Roald Dahl, the latter two clear-as-day social reprobates—but also presumed unimpeachable writers such as Sandman legend Neil Gaiman, lately accused of non-consensual “rough and degrading sex” by two women (whose roughness Gaiman does not dispute, but has defended as consensual); and the lionised China Miéville, accused in 2013 by an ex-girlfriend of extreme emotional abuse, which he explained as the result of an “open relationship with my partner, of which I made [the complainant] fully aware”.
How possible or advisable is it to cancel these legends of literature for harrowingly human ferity? I have no answers. The cards have two faces. And I wager the jury will tear itself apart and never make it back to court.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist