Alice Munro at the Sebel Town House, 1979. (Paul Stephen Pearson/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

The first lines in “Royal Beatings,” from Alice Munro’s 1978 collection Who Do You Think You Are?, read as follows: “Royal Beating. That was Flo’s promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating.” The capitalization indicates the gravity of the threat; the incipient violence tilts in the direction of a darkness that belies its author’s undeserved reputation as a writer of quiet, recondite stories for women. “The word Royal lolled on Flo’s tongue, took on trappings.” Likewise, Munro’s deceptively simple prose, her straightforward syntax and unassuming vocabulary, barely hint at the enormous psychological, sexual, and social depths her fiction plumbed.

One need only read a few sentences of Munro’s writing to understand that one is in the presence of literary genius, though this is a term Munro herself would likely have disavowed. Always humble when speaking about her own writing, she nevertheless occupied a unique position in contemporary literature. The writer and critic Cynthia Ozick referred to her as “our Chekhov,” but this feels – bizarrely – too limiting. Comparing her to the great Russian naturalist seems restrictive, ignoring Munro’s subversiveness and her tendency, especially in her later fiction, to run to material that bucked up against a strict mimetic presentation.

Take, for example, this moment from “Spaceships Have Landed,” one of the strangest stories in the Munro canon:

A new leader appeared, a Bannershee Queen, her name was Joylinda, and her schemes were diabolical. She had poisoned the blackberries growing on the bank, and the Toms had eaten some, being careless and hungry after their journey. They lay writhing and sweating down among the juicy weeds when the poison struck. They pressed their bellies into mud that was slightly soft and warm like just-made fudge. They felt their innards shrivel and they were shaking in every limb, but they had to get up and stagger about, looking for an antidote. They tried chewing sword grass – which, true to its name, could slice your skin – they smeared their mouths with mud, and considered biting into a live frog if they could catch one, but decided at last it was chokecherries that would save them from death. They ate a cluster of the tiny chokecherries and the skin inside their mouths puckered desperately, so that they had to run to the river to drink the water. They threw themselves down on it, where it was all silty among the waterlilies and you couldn’t see the bottom. They drank and drank it, while the bluebottles flew straight as arrows over their heads. They were saved.

It’s difficult, to put it mildly, to imagine Chekhov writing that scene. Or a later sentence, which comes at the end of the same story and highlights one of the most neglected elements of Munro’s writing: her humour. “Billy went to Toronto and got a job, which Rhea’s father said had something to do with schizophrenics or drug addicts or Christianity.” That sentence in fact has resonance with the work of another master of the short story, one of Munro’s avowed influences – Flannery O’Connor. (One can almost hear Hazel Motes’s landlady in Wise Blood, after he has blinded himself and wrapped his torso in barbed wire, stating, “Well, it’s not normal. It’s like one of them gory stories, it’s something that people have quit doing – like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats.”)

Munro, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was in many ways closer in spirit and practice to O’Connor than Chekhov. Like O’Connor, Munro took Christianity – albeit a Protestant strain as opposed to O’Connor’s tortured Catholicism – as a running theme in her work. Both writers focused largely on rural environs – Georgia in O’Connor’s case; Southwestern Ontario, a region known as “Sowesto” or, latterly, “Munro country,” in Munro’s. Both writers were suspicious of urban centres (see above re: Toronto) and of intellectuals. And both had a clear-eyed understanding of the human condition and its apparently myriad failings and foibles.

O’Connor includes this anecdote in a talk called “Writing Short Stories,” and it feels like something that could easily have been produced by Munro:

I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,” and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there – showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.

Munro, for her part, was an expert at dramatizing how folks will do. The subtlety in her stories arises frequently out of a collision between how folks will do and the artificial strictures their social environments – rural, conservative, given to gossip and judgment – place upon them. Women in Munro’s stories are sexual creatures who often hanker for a more fulfilling life than what is offered by the traditional trajectory of marriage and family; it’s not an accident that so many women in Munro’s work engage in infidelity.

The stories in Munro’s oeuvre are hugely transgressive, though her pristine prose style can disguise this to some extent. Like Jane Austen, she was highly attuned to the importance of social status and reputation; unlike Austen, she did not guarantee her protagonists a happy ending. Margaret Atwood, a contemporary and friend of Munro’s, views this at least in part as a result of a strict Presbyterian upbringing.

Munro’s acute consciousness of social class, and of the minutiae and sneers separating one level from the next, is honestly come by, as is – from the Presbyterians – her characters’ habit of rigorously examining their own deeds, emotions, motives, and consciences, and finding them wanting. In a traditional Protestant culture, such as that of small-town Sowesto, forgiveness is not easily come by, punishments are frequent and harsh, potential humiliation and shame lurk around every corner, and nobody gets away with much.

When Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, she was cited as a “master of the contemporary short story.” The indefinite article is erroneous; she was not a master of the contemporary short story, but the master. And she seemed to appear fully formed, as if from the brow of Zeus, with her first collection in 1968. Dance of the Happy Shades won her a Governor General’s Literary Award; she would go on to win the same prize in 1978 (for Who Do You Think You Are?) and 1986 (for The Progress of Love). She won the Scotiabank Giller Prize twice, for Love of a Good Woman (1998) and Runaway (2004). The Man Booker International Prize came her way in 2009, and then, in 2013, the Nobel. (She was not technically the first Canadian to win the Nobel – that would be Saul Bellow, born in Lachine, Quebec.)

Reviewing Too Much Happiness in 2009, the critic Philip Marchand wrote, “If Alice Munro had never existed, part of the soul of Canada would have remained inarticulate, forgotten, submerged.” True, but also too limiting. (One wonders whether, in the presence of a talent as large and unconstrained as Munro’s, any generalizing statement about her work could ever be adequate. One expects not.) Like all great art, Munro’s transcends time and place and subject. Like O’Connor, Munro located the universal in the specific and her stories remain as indelible today as the day they were written. Her fiction is timeless as, necessarily, is her spirit. Munro may be gone, but her animating spirit will survive and all of humanity is richer because of it.

This article was first published by That Shakespearean Rag.