Alice Munro’s Runaway: Stories of Women in Dilemma

Abstract

Alice Ann Munro, a Canadian short story writer and Nobel laureate (2013),  is the author of seven books of short stories, including the forthcoming Open Secrets, and one novel, Lives of Girls and Women. It is her miraculous gift to make her stories as real and unforgettable as our own. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about, women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children, become as alive and vivid as our own kith and kin. In Alice Munro’s superb story collection, Runaway, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer. Runaway is a book of extraordinary engaging stories about love and emotions and its intriguing loyalty and disloyalty, from the title story about a young woman who is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the lustre of her intimate relationships. There are eight short stories in the book. There are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love, between men and women, between friends, between parents and children that are the stuff of all our lives. My attempt in the present paper will be to investigate Munro’s inimitable style of storytelling in the present perspective in her delineation of different facets of her female protagonists in her Man Booker International Prize winner story book, Runaway.