Alice Munro's narrative art

The Confiding First Person Narrator Changing Perspectives Competing Testimonies The Queer Bright Moment The Love of a Good Woman What Is Remembered A Constant Re-working of Close Personal Material. IN HER ESSAY, "ROSE AND JANET: ALICE Munro's Metafiction,"! Canadian academic Helen Hoy documents the extraordinarily tortuous publica- tion history of Alice Munro's fourth book, the collection entitled Who Do You Think You Are?, published in Canada in 1978, and as The Beggar Maid in the United States in 1979 and Britain in 1980 . She explains that Munro had submitted the original manuscript with stories by two dif- ferent first-person narrators, Rose and Janet, but by the time the stories reached the stage of galley proofs, she had decided that their narrative voices were indistinguishable from each other. At considerable finan- cial cost to herself, she succeeded in arresting the publication, extracting from her publisher (Macmillan) a fresh deadline, before which she had transformed the collection into ten third-person stories about Rose. The Janet narratives were revised, to be included in the subsequent collection, The Moons of Jupiter (1982).