The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose — Stories of Flo and Rose

Rose and Flo

Hanratty, Ontario, in the late 1940s and 1950s: a small town with a clear sense of where the line runs between the respectable and the poor, and Rose’s family on the wrong side of it. They live in the back half of a house on Hanratty’s low street; Flo, Rose’s stepmother, runs a store out of the front. The poverty is specific and textured — not a symbol of deprivation but a set of actual conditions: what they eat, how the house smells, the quality of the clothes, the way the other children understand what Rose is.

Flo is the novel’s great secondary character. She is not a villain, though she is sometimes an antagonist. She is a woman of fierce practicality, dark humor, and a complete absence of illusion about the world, who has managed her reduced circumstances with a competence Rose both admires and cannot wait to escape. The stories Flo tells — town gossip, old scandals, cautionary tales — are the novel’s oral history of a world that has its own rules and logic, rules Rose learns and then violates by leaving.

The early stories do what Munro’s stories always do: they give you a great deal and then abruptly move forward in time, so that you arrive at a later moment aware that something happened in the gap and uncertain exactly what. Rose at school, Rose beginning to understand that she is not like the other children not just in poverty but in the quality of her attention, Rose winning the scholarship that will take her to university — these are rendered in Munro’s characteristically oblique mode, which notices everything and says less than it knows.

The Class Escape

The scholarship takes Rose to a university where she meets Patrick, who is wealthy and insecure and drawn to Rose in ways that are partly about her intelligence and partly about what she represents: the authentically poor girl he can rescue and form, without quite admitting this to himself. Rose marries him. The discomfort of the marriage — the class gap made domestic, the social situations that reveal it, Rose’s awareness of her own performance of the life she has married into — is rendered with the merciless precision that Munro gives to self-deception.

The divorce, when it comes, is followed by an acting career that is itself a form of class commentary. An actress plays roles; she inhabits other people’s lives. Rose has been doing this since she left Hanratty. The question the later stories turn on is not whether Rose can escape her origins — she has — but what escaping costs and what it leaves intact. She keeps going back to Hanratty, to Flo, who is aging and eventually needs care. Flo’s decline, handled in a few late pages with characteristic brevity, is one of Munro’s finest achievements: a life summarized without condescension, a relationship given its due without sentimentality.

The time-ellipsis is the formal mechanism that makes the linked-story structure work. Munro does not narrate Rose’s life continuously; she takes samples at significant moments, and the gaps between them — years, sometimes decades — are as present as the scenes themselves. You feel what has been skipped. This technique, which looks simple and is not, lets Munro cover forty years of a woman’s life in 210 pages without feeling compressed, because the ellipsis is doing work that scene cannot.

The Booker Shortlist and Munro’s Rise

The Beggar Maid was published in Canada in 1978 under the title Who Do You Think You Are? — a title that is itself a piece of class analysis, the question small-town Ontario asked of women who got above themselves. When the book was published in the United States and United Kingdom, the title was changed to The Beggar Maid, after the Edward Burne-Jones painting of the beggar maid Cophetua that figures in one of the stories. The two titles illuminate different aspects of the same book: the Canadian title names the social pressure; the English title names the aesthetic and erotic object that class mobility creates.

The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980. Munro was the first Canadian to be shortlisted (she lost to William Golding’s Rites of Passage), and the shortlist established her British and international reputation. Until then she had been an important Canadian writer; after it she was a significant international one.

In the Munro canon, The Beggar Maid sits between Lives of Girls and Women (1971), the earlier linked-story novel of a girl growing up in a small Ontario town, and the great story collections of her mature period — The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth. It is the longest sustained engagement with a single protagonist she ever undertook, and for readers who want the arc of a life rather than the concentration of a single story, it is the essential Munro. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, recognized as “master of the contemporary short story.” Rose and Flo, in their back-half house on Hanratty’s low street, are where the mastery is most fully at home.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Munro’s Booker-shortlisted breakthrough and still her most sustained portrait of a single life: ten linked stories that follow Rose from poverty in small-town Ontario through escape, marriage, divorce, and return with an elliptical precision that leaves everything essential unsaid and fully present.