Lives of Girls and Women

Del’s Education

The novel is structured as a series of linked episodes from Del Jordan’s childhood and adolescence in and around Jubilee, a small town in rural Ontario in the 1940s and 1950s. Del lives at the edge of two worlds: the town proper, with its social hierarchies and Protestant propriety, and the bush country where her family lives and where the rules are different—rougher, more physical, less concerned with what people think. Her father operates a fox and mink ranch on a country road; her mother sells encyclopaedias door to door and delivers passionate self-educated lectures on evolutionary biology that embarrass everyone. Del is defined by both of them and by neither.

The episodes proceed roughly chronologically through childhood and into adolescence. Her father’s brothers—a household of old bachelors who live together in the country—her mother’s determined secularist project, the summer spent with her best friend Naomi cataloguing the sexual activity of everyone they know, Uncle Craig’s unfinished local history manuscript that Del’s mother insists she will complete: each episode is a complete short story in Munro’s characteristic manner, with an elliptical time structure that jumps forward without ceremony and ends not at a climax but at a moment of altered understanding.

The two most powerful late episodes are Del’s religious conversion—a summer of intense Baptist faith that arrives with the force of romantic love and departs with similar abruptness—and the affair with Garnet French, a farm boy with a physical presence that overwhelms her better judgment. Garnet attempts to baptize Del in a river—literally to submerge her and bring her up renewed, Christian, his—and her refusal is the novel’s central act of self-definition. She nearly drowns. She chooses her life. The episode is among Munro’s finest pieces of fiction.

The Munro Voice

Lives of Girls and Women was published in 1971, Munro’s second book and her only novel, and it establishes with complete confidence the voice and method she would develop across every subsequent collection. The elliptical structure—stories that skip over years in a sentence, that end not at resolution but at the moment when something is understood—is fully present here. So is the interest in female interiority as a site of permanent, low-level concealment: Del constantly knows more than she says, feels more than she shows, understands more than the adults around her suspect. Girlhood in Munro is partly about learning this discipline.

The Ontario specificity is a feature, not a limitation. Jubilee is not a universal small town; it is this small town, in this part of Canada, with these particular social structures and this particular mix of Protestant churches and this particular relation between the town and the surrounding bush. The details—the names, the denominations, the agricultural economy, the winter—accumulate into a density that gives the episodes their weight. This is Munro’s method throughout her career: the specific as the route to the universal, not the other way around.

The comparison to subsequent story collections is useful for readers who want to continue after this novel. Runaway (2004) is the most purely craft-focused of the later collections, with the tightest stories. Dear Life (2012), her final collection, contains a section of autobiographical pieces about her own childhood in rural Ontario that reads as a direct companion to Lives of Girls and Women—the same territory, seen from sixty years of distance. Reading them together is one of the pleasures available to a Munro reader who has reached the end of her work.

The Only Novel

Munro was asked throughout her career why she wrote only short stories, and her answers varied—the practical demands of raising children made the shorter form more manageable; she was simply a short story writer; the novel’s sequential demands did not suit her way of thinking about time. All of these answers are true as far as they go, but Lives of Girls and Women suggests another possibility: that she found what she was looking for in the linked story structure and saw no reason to push beyond it. The novel achieves its length not by sustaining a single narrative but by accumulating episodes, each complete in itself, each illuminating the central figure from a different angle.

The ‘Epilogue’ that closes the book is the clearest statement of what this form means to Munro. Del, now adult and intending to leave Jubilee, attempts to write a Gothic novel set in the town—a melodrama involving murder and obsession and the dark underside of respectable life. She discovers that what she wants to put into the novel will not fit: the real Jubilee, with its specific textures and its actual people, keeps disrupting the melodrama she is trying to impose. The episode is a small essay on Munro’s own aesthetic, embedded in the fiction it describes.

Munro received the Nobel Prize in 2013—the first Canadian woman to receive it, and the first writer primarily known for the short story form to win since before the Second World War. The Swedish Academy’s citation described her as a “master of the contemporary short story.” Lives of Girls and Women is where the mastery first fully appears.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Munro’s only novel is the essential single-volume entry to her work and one of the great Canadian coming-of-age books: Del Jordan’s education in a small Ontario town establishes the voice, the method, and the unsparing intelligence that would define her Nobel Prize-winning career.