Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel
by Alice Munro
Changing Times, Changing Girls And Women
The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a
Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, autobiographical in form but
not in fact, that chronicles a young girls growing up in rural Ontario in the
1940s.
Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her fathers fox farm,
where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family
friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more
time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic,
opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mothers
boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom
she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.

Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex,
birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All
along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-
town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration
of Alice Munros unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.
Personal Review: Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel by Alice
Munro
Alice Munro is widely known as a short-story writer. However, in her career
there supposedly be a novel: "Lives of Girls and Women", first published in
1971. In one of her rare interviews - to "The NY Times" in the 1980s - she
says that to her view this book is more a series of interconnected stories
than a novel per se. It is not because she says so, but anyone familiar of
the structure of a regular novel is able to know that this is not really one of
them.
There are elements that belong to the novel dynamics - the same narrator,
the same group of characters and so on - but, then again, they could
belong to short stories either. As a matter of fact, each of the `chapter' of
"Lives of Girls and Women" ends in itself. In other words, each of them has
a beginning, middle, and an end. However, it is not the vital to decided
whether this book is a novel or a collection of short stories. Either one will
not change how brilliant it is.
The second book published by Alice Munro, this is one of her best
accomplished works as a whole. Her posterior collections have some of
her best short stories ever - but as a whole they do not keep the same
level. However in this one, none of the chapters is better or worse than the
following one.
Throughout a 40-year career, Alice Munro has established herself as one
of the most important writers currently working. Her stories deal with
ordinary people, whose lives would not be supposedly interesting. But, in
her pages, this lives become unforgettable.
In "Lives of Girls and Women" we follow the upbringing of a girl in rural
Canada - this could be an autobiographical book, but it is not the point to
discover it. We accompany Del Jordan since her childhood until her days
as a young woman expecting to go to the university and chance the
pattern in her family's life.
"Lives of Girls and Women" are, after all, a book about changing times. At
some point, Del's mother notices that `there is a change coming I think in
the lives of girls and women'. More than thirty years after its first
publishing, the book proves that those changes came to stay.

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