NEW YORK — Robert Lecker has been reading, teaching and writing for decades about Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize winner from Canada known for her short stories. A professor of English at McGill University in Montreal, and author of numerous critical studies of Canadian fiction, he considers Munro the “jewel” in the crown of her country’s literature and the source of the richest material for classroom discussion.
But since learning that Munro refused to leave her husband after he sexually abused and harassed her daughter, Lecker now wonders how to learn her job, or if he should even try.
“I decided to give a Munro course in the winter of 2025,” says Lecker. “Now I have serious questions about whether I feel ethically competent to offer that course.”
Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Munro and James Munro, wrote in the Toronto Star earlier this month that she was assaulted at age 9 by Munro’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin. She alleged that he continued to harass and abuse her over the next few years, and that he lost interest when she became a teenager. In her 20s, she told her mother about Fremlin’s abuse. But Munro, after briefly leaving Fremlin, returned and stayed with him until his death in 2013. She would explain to Skinner that she “loved him too much” to stay apart.
When Munro died in May at the age of 92, she was celebrated worldwide for her stories that documented rare insights into the secrets, motivations, passions and cruelties of her characters, especially those of girls and women. Admirers cited her not only as a literary inspiration, but also as a kind of moral guide, sometimes described as ‘Saint Alice’. A New York Times essay published shortly after her death, by Canadian author Sheila Heti, was titled, “I Don’t Write Like Alice Munro, But I Want to Live Like Her.”
“No one knows the compromises another person makes, especially when that person is as private as she is and turns her trials into fiction,” Heti wrote. “But whatever the truth of her daily existence, she still shines as a symbol of artistic purity.”
Educators in Canada and beyond are now reconsidering her life and work. At Western University in London, Ontario, Munro’s alma mater, the school posted a statement on its website saying it “took time to carefully consider the impact of the revelations.” Since 2018, Western University has offered an Alice Munro Chair in Creativity, with the mission to “lead the creative culture of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and serve as a mentor and model.” That chair, which was held by Heti last school year, will remain vacant as “we carefully consider Munro’s legacy and her links with the West,” the school said.
Requests to Heti’s agent and publicists for comment were not immediately returned.
For the fall semester at Harvard University, authors and faculty members Laura van den Berg and Neel Mukherjee will co-teach “Reading for Fiction Writers,” a survey of literary works ranging from the science fiction of Octavia Butler to “realist” fiction. from Munro. Van den Berg, an award-winning writer whose books include the short story collection “The Isle of Youth” and the novel “State of Paradise,” says Munro’s inability to support Skinner has forced her to rethink her approach to the classroom.
“I will never read to Munro the same way again, nor will I teach her the same way,” she says. “What was so painful for me about what Andrea Skinner experienced is the silence. And the feeling that she could break her silence after her mother was gone. For me, it would feel like a second silence to stand in front of a group of students and read the lecture I had originally prepared.”
A former student of Lecker’s, Kellie Elrick, says she’s not sure she would have been better off if she had known about Munro and her daughter. Munro’s stories have enriched her life, she says, and she doesn’t regret reading them. Elrick, who is entering her fourth year at McGill, sees parallel stories, “difficult to reconcile,” of “Munro the writer” and “Munro the mother.”
“I think it might be both productive and dangerous to read an author’s work biographically,” she added. “It may make us (the readers) think we may understand things, but there are things we can never really know about the lives and intentions of writers.”
One of the Munro stories Van den Berg and Mukherjee want to teach is “Friend of My Youth,” told by a woman long estranged from her mother, whose “ideas were in line with some progressive views of her time, and mine reflected the ideas I favored.” Mukherjee, a 2014 Booker Prize finalist for the novel “The Lives of Others,” is unsure how or whether to work in the recent news about Munro when teaching “Friend of My Youth,” which the author assigned to her had dedicated my own mother.
He believes in separating “the art from the artist, that we have all done bad things.” He considers himself “very conflicted,” and shares Van den Berg’s disgust that Munro chose her husband over her daughter, but also that her work may have “taken on richer depth, now that we know something in her life that she may have tried to find out. come to terms with it.”
“I don’t think of writers as so-called saints,” he says.
