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    A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Runaway"
    A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Runaway"
    A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Runaway"
    Ebook43 pages29 minutes

    A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Runaway"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Runaway," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Newsmakers for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Newsmakers for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535832441
    A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Runaway"

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      A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Runaway" - Gale

      information.

      Runaway

      Alice Munro

      2004

      Introduction

      When asked in an interview in 1982 whether she has tried to teach anything in her stories, Alice Munro replied, "Ahhh! No lessons. No lessons ever!" In Runaway, Munro explores the circumstances and consequences of running away, but does so without judgment, and without resolution. While three of the stories are connected by the same protagonist, the rest of the stories seem at first disconnected, united only in their common location of Western Canada. In each of the stories, however, there are either characters who are running from something or someone, or characters who miss one who has left. Rather than pursuing her topic relentlessly, though, Munro represents it indirectly, while at the same time exploring the nuances of complex relationships, the way in which a moment can change peoples' lives forever, and the paradoxical sense of looking back on one's life with both regret and contentment. Each of her stories spans several generations, and she has a remarkable talent for jumping across several decades without losing the narrative thread. Many of the endings are delightfully or unsettlingly ambiguous, depending on what readers are seeking.

      Author Biography

      Alice Munro was born July 10, 1931, to Ann Clarke and Robert Eric Laidlaw, a farming couple from Wingham, Ontario, Canada. She grew up in an area that was neither entirely rural nor entirely urban, a location that resembles many of the ambiguous settings of her stories. When she was twelve, her mother developed Parkinson's disease, which debilitated her until her death in 1959; witnessing her mother's decline would be an experience that Munro would later draw from in much of her fiction. Though the family was not wealthy, Alice excelled academically, earning a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario. When she published her first short story in 1950, The Dimensions of a Shadow, those who knew her wondered at the discrepancy between the person they knew and the darker vision of her narrative. She would later write that she began to understand the double life she was leading, as though she were living two completely different lives—the real and absolutely solitary life and the life of appearances.

      She married James Munro in 1951, and they moved to Vancouver, where she would begin to write from personal experience about intimate family relationships and the struggles of women and girls. After several years there, the Munros moved again to Victoria, British Columbia, and opened up a book shop in 1963. By this time, the Munros had three girls: Sheila, Jenny,

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