She tagged five of the best Alice Munro short stories, including:
"The Beggar Maid" – New Yorker, 27 June 1977Read about the other entries on the list.
This was the second Munro story to be published in the New Yorker in 1977, after Royal Beatings a few months earlier. Both are part of a series of stories following the character of Rose, over more than 40 years, and returning always to Hanratty, Munro’s fictional small town in southern Ontario. Rose’s life follows a very similar path to that of the author – from bookish girl growing up on the wrong side of town to scholarship, unwise first marriage, early motherhood, divorce, creative success and a measure of fame, and a return to the small town from which she longed to flee. It is an arc Munro revisited many times over the years. Here, in the fifth “Rose and Flo story”, our heroine has made first escape to University of Western Ontario in London (just like the author). As is the way of things for girls like Rose, she is only trading one trap for another: agreeing to marry privileged but priggish Patrick, who worshipped her and “because it did not seem likely such an offer would come her way again”.
Shame, self-delusion, ambition and regret, our inability to know our own minds – all the Munrovian raw materials are here. “It was a miracle; it was a mistake. It was what she had dreamed of; it was not what she wanted.” The inevitability of their doomed romance is clear from their first visits to their family homes: the plastic table cloth and tube of fluorescent light in the kitchen back at Hanratty; a lime-green plastic napkin holder in the shape of a swan, in contrast to Patrick’s parents’ mansion on Vancouver Island, where “size was noticeable everywhere and particularly thickness. Thickness of towels and rugs and handles of knives and forks, and silences. There was a terrible amount of luxury and unease.” Poor Rose.
Ten years of disastrous marriage ensue – she hits her head against the bedpost, he hits her; she smashes a gravy boat through the dining-room window (it was the decade of smashing gravy boats). “They could not separate until enough damage had been done, until nearly mortal damage had been done to keep them apart.” And, Munro continues in the next sentence, “until Rose could get a job and make her own money, so perhaps there was a very ordinary reason after all.” Munro was always alert to the economics of romance.
A chance encounter in airport late at night many years later results in a childish, ugly gesture, “a timed explosion of disgust and loathing”, which haunts the reader as it does Rose. How could anybody hate her that much, the middle-aged (now moderately famous TV presenter) Rose wonders. “Oh Patrick could, Patrick could.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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