'Dance of the Happy Shades', a collection of short stories by Alice Munro, discusses the forbidden freedoms that women exercise in spite of society's expectations. Introduces young, female protagonists confronting expectations as firmly rooted as the rural landscape in which they live in. Creates a strange mixture of physical freedom and emotional claustrophobia. Characters and situations are real enough, and yet they’re an unwanted familiarity seems to develop. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.
Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and later turned to turkey farming. Her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. She is of Irish and Scottish descent. Her mother suddenly became ill when she reached the age of 10. Sadly this illness never improved and her mother died when Alice was only 15 years old.
Munro had begun writing stories as a teenager, and she persevered in her attempt to establish herself as a writer despite years of rejection from publishers and the limitations imposed on her career by the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. Her first collection of stories was published as Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates. .