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Alice Munro
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Lives of Girls and Women Paperback – February 13, 2001

by Alice Munro (Author)
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The debut novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (The New York Times).

“Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.”—Newsweek
 
Rural Ontario, 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother’s boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. 
 
Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro’s unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Vintage
  4. Publication date
    February 13, 2001
  5. Dimensions
    5.2 x 0.65 x 7.95 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0375707492
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0375707490
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

?Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary. Newsweek

From the Inside Flap

The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.

Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (February 13, 2001)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375707492
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375707490
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.65 x 7.95 inches
  • Customer Reviews:

About the author

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Alice Munro

Alice Munro

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Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous books.During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Prize, the National Book Circle Critics Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. In Canada, she has won the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Libris Award.Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
538 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

AM
5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2024
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I have no excuse for never having read, until now after her recent death, Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro, other than to say that for years short stories just didn’t appeal to me. I found them to be too short, too open ended, found myself wanting just more of a story. Over the last years, I have come to appreciate them more, having found some wonderful connected story collections as well as some amazing stand alone stories. This book is considered by some to be her only novel, but it is also described as a collection of short stories. Either way, I shouldn’t have waited so long.

Del Jordan is a young girl growing up in rural Ontario, Canada in the 1940’s, discovering who she is from the women in her life. Her mother, ahead of the times defied convention and her father to get an education. She sold encyclopedias, had a penchant for learning and lives in town away from the end of Flats Road and their the fox farm. Del’s aunts, stalwarts of tradition especially when it came to the place of women in society, her best friend Naomi and others give Del much to consider on her journey to womanhood.

It’s one of those quiet books without a lot an action, telling of ordinary lives, daily life during that time, yet intimate and introspective touching on death, sexuality, belief in God and the role of women in society. It’s a book that becomes extraordinary because of the impeccable writing and the way Munro takes you into the heart and mind of Del Jordan, how we come to know her and the women around her through such perfect characterization. Of course, I’ll definitely try some of her short stories.
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Roger Brunyate
4.0 out of 5 stars Memoir of an Ontario Girlhood
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2009
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The jacket describes LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN as Alice Munro's only novel. But this is misleading, since the book's seven chapters read more like a sequence of the short stories for which Munro is justly famous, and the whole seems more like an autobiographical memoir than a fictional narrative. The setting is the small town of Jubilee in Southern Ontario, not so different from Alice Munro's own birthplace of Wingham. Like Munro herself, the narrator, Del Jordan, is the daughter of a fox fur farmer, and is of a similar age, passing through adolescence in the 1940s. Each chapter focuses on a different year in Del's life, from fourth grade through high-school graduation. She is a normal girl from modest surroundings, and her experiences are by no means unique. Yet she has a mother who, for all her eccentricities, believes in ideas and education; it soon becomes clear that Del (like the author) is destined to break clear of the limitations of these surroundings and become a writer.

Munro's writing is straightforward and evocative, but it relies on small realizations rather than big events, so the book may seem dull at first. It began to take wing for me with the fourth chapter, "Age of Faith," describing Del as a young teenager becoming interested in religion. "Changes and Ceremonies," the next section, is about the school musical and what appears to be a budding romance between the producer and the school music teacher -- a touching story set off by the gentle sadness of its ending. In the final two chapters, "Lives of Girls and Women" and "Baptizing," romance is no longer something that Del observes from the outside, but a force that she must fit into her own view of herself, as she struggles with the changes in her body, confusing emotions, and the effect she has on men. One result of Munro casting the story as fiction is to enable her to treat Del's sexual discoveries much more frankly than she might have felt free to do in an autobiography. Temporarily derailed by love, Del's plans do not work out entirely as she had hoped, yet there is no doubt where she is heading in the end.

Just as Alice Munro has used her birthplace as a source of wisdom without allowing herself to be confined by it, so Del Jordan leaves home only to return in spirit. A touching epilogue shows her looking back at Jubilee, consciously altering its details for the sake of her fiction, yet poignantly aware of the life there that she cannot capture on the page. It is a surprisingly postmodern device for 1971, but it gives this charming hybrid a context that has one foot in art and the other in everyday reality.
11 people found this helpful
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Richard Seltzer
5.0 out of 5 stars "Deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum"
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2022
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While it is a novel, individual chapters could be read and enjoyed as short stories. My favorite chapter is Lives of Girls and Women p. 157. But there is a cumulative effect. As you get to know the narrator and those who matter to her the book gets better, much better.

Her first-person narrative feels like she is talking to you. That casual tone makes her concise descriptions of people and settings all the more striking:
"My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up anytime, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present." p. 83
"He said there was a quicksand hole in there that would take down a two-ton truck like a bite of breakfast." p. 4
"It was a hot and perfectly still evening, light lying in bands on the tree trunks, gold as the skin o apricots." p. 41
"... eyes round and wet-looking, like sucked caramels." p. 134
"they had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference." p. 43

Writing about women in 1971, with the story starting decades before, in the aftermath of WWII, she was prophetic and inspirational.
"There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals." p. 193

She inserts nuggets of wisdom and witty comments about human nature:
"... he was the sort of man who becomes a steadfast eccentric almost before he i out of his teens." p. 4s
"It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past." p. 37
nuggets of wisdom
"There it was, the mysterious and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed, in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them." p. 44
"There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere." p. 55
"Love is not for the undepilated." p. 197

I particularly like her insights into the process of writing fiction
"The reasons for things happening I seemed vaguely to know but could not explain; I expected all that would come clear later. The main thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day. p. 270
"They were talking to somebody who believed that the only duty of a writer is to produce a masterpiece." p. 70
"People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable -- deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum." p. 276
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Top reviews from other countries

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N
5.0 out of 5 stars I don't usually recommend book after they've been nominated for huge awards
Reviewed in Canada on August 12, 2015
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I don't usually recommend book after they've been nominated for huge awards. I'd read some Alice Munro years ago, and thought it would be a perfect choice for the Women's Resource Centre book club that I'm part of here in Brandon.

The combination of books I read for the month of November, and consequently during NaNoWriMo was maybe not the best combination of choices. Each one was heavy and laden with dense material the require digesting, which is why it's taken me so long to write reviews lately.

On the other hand, it's led my brain to go a few places it wouldn't have normally. It helped me think a little bit more about how I'd like 2014 to go compared to 2013.

That can be a good thing right???

I like to let people wonder, and I like to watch, and observe. This is how I read Munro's book, as an observer, and someone listening to the stories and thoughts of others. These are qualities I put to work for me in my working life as well. It's a little like reading the book Gripped by Jason Donnelly, but without the cat or the sock. You can read my review of that book here, or better yet, just go read that book.

Lives of Girls and women was like listening to a story my Grandma would have told. It was like being transported back to her time on the prairies in the 1930's. This was situated slightly later, and in north-western Ontario, but the feelings, sentiments and Canadiana that appeared throughout the book made me feel like I was a kid again, waiting for Grandma's bedtime stories.

It's a group of short stories, and yes, they all feature some of the same characters. They happen to be arranged in chronological order in the book, and each story focuses on a theme.

Why isn't it a novel then?

For one, because it's brilliant, and secondly because you could read each story as a stand alone. They are each succinctly crafted and beautifully written. As an introduction to Munro's works, I would highly recommend starting with this book. I plan to read many more of her works in the future, and I hope you do the same.
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Dr Buddhadeb Chattopadhyay
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in India on November 14, 2014
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I love it
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Allie
5.0 out of 5 stars As finely worked as an intricate embroidery
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2013
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This is a wonderful book, rich as a banquet, as finely worked as an intricate embroidery, the kind of book I love to read and the kind I aspire to write.
It reads like an auto-biography but is in fact a novel, which chronicles the girlhood and journey to womanhood of Del. Del is an extra-ordinary girl in an ordinary town - the town's name, Jubilee, is beautifully ironic as nothing the least bit celebratory or festive ever happens there. Two things make her extra-ordinary. Her non-conforming, encyclopaedia-selling mother is the first. She brings Del up in spite of her dull, compliant father, to question everything, especially the sacred cows of Jubilee society, and to expect great things of herself. The second thing is Del herself, her gimlet eye and penetrating understanding, her capacity for reflection, her innate intelligence.
Warring against these forces are the usual, but so truthfully rendered, forces of adolescence; peer pressure, childish curiosity, teenage rebellion. Any woman and I suspect most men will have spent time, as Del does, both yearning for God and not believing in him, hating and loving their parents at one and the same time, eaten up with stammering self-consciousness when the boy we have been fantasising about in explicit, breathless Technicolor just so much as looks our way. The consuming fear and obsessive fascination of sex. This is a coming of age novel as good, and probably better, than any I have read.
Jubilee is peopled by a cast of wonderful characters, some of them only sketchily drawn and yet still amazingly corporeal; Del's two eccentric Aunts, Mr Chamberlain, the paedophile Radio announcer, Miss Farris the doomed school teacher. The small town shops and lack-lustre amateur theatricals, the fiercely parochial church communities, the nefarious goings-on at the out-of-town dance hall; they will make you see your own town and your own neighbours in a new light.
This novel read to me like an HD, deluxe version of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls but whereas that book has a dashed, lightweight quality (it was written in a fortnight, and it shows), this one is written in considered, substantial, clever prose. Munro's language drips with nuance and colour and glinting facets; she has a knack of describing a thing from two different angles, `tender', say, and then `obstinate', which makes the tenderness not a thing of slush and weakness but a thing of obdurate strength. The words may not hurry the story along but goodness we get dimension, depth and flavour which lingers long after the story is done.
Munro's books and her style of writing may be out of fashion. The modern taste for literature is for boiled-down prose and accelerated plot; `too many words' is the plaintive cry. To me, we might as well say that Van Gogh used too much paint or Beethoven too many notes.
If you like this let me offer, with great humility, this:  Lost Boys
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A
3.0 out of 5 stars 女であること
Reviewed in Japan on December 1, 2013
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　ペーパーバックは、正味２７５ページ各ページ３２行前後で、紙質も比較的良いようです。長短マチマチの８章からなっていて、単語も文章も難しくありません。
　始めの３章はまだ年少の頃の身近な人たちの思い出話が扱われ、残りの５章では「性に目覚める頃」である１２歳前後から高校卒業の頃までの男友達、女友達などとの往来が描かれています。
　作者自身の経験をベースにしている作品ということになるのでしょうが、読んでいてあまり懐かしい感じがしないのは、時代が大分違うからでしょうか。他の作品集に見られるような切り口の鋭さが余り感じられないような気もします。どちらも個人的な感想で、名作だと評価する方は当然おられると思いますが。
　ただ、「男は誰でも勝手にやりたいことをやれるが、女はそうはいかない」といったセリフがあり、腕力を使ってでも女を支配して当然と考える男というものの救いようのなさなども描かれていて、更に「栴檀は双葉より芳し」と感じさせる表現も随所にあって、アリス・マンローのファンならば読んで間違いのない作品ではあると思います。
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Mareike
4.0 out of 5 stars eine schöne Geschichte, unglaublich ehrlich erzählt!
Reviewed in Germany on June 22, 2004
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Del Jordan wächst in den vierziger Jahren in einem kleinen Ort in Kanada auf. Das Kleinstadtleben nimmt sie vollkommen gefangen, und unglaublich ehrlich wird von der komplizierten Beziehung zwischen ihren Eltern zum Beispiel berichtet.
Del erzählt ihre Geschichte sachlich und mit weniger Sentimentalität, als man erwarten würde. Ganz kühl blickt sie auf teilweise traumatische Ereignisse, und zeigt durch ihren Erzählstil, was sie als Kind gesehen und verstanden hat. Gerade dadurch wird ihr Stil so authentisch!
Eine schöne Geschichte, in der die uns allen bekannten Themen (z.B. Entfremdung von alten Schulfreunden) auf eine schöne und ehrliche Art erzählt und verarbeitet werden.
Am Ende ist man traurig, Del zurück zu lassen. Man hätte sie gern noch weiter durch ihr Leben begleitet!
Ehrlich lesenswert!!
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