As Alice Munro was embarking on her literary career, she was dismissed by a university professor as just another housewife writer. We know nothing else about the professor; on Wednesday, Munro鈥檚 daughter Jenny accepted the Nobel prize for literature on behalf of her mother.
When she won the Governor General鈥檚 Award in 1969 for her first short-story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, Munro was interviewed by a Daily Colonist reporter who described her as a 鈥淰ictoria housewife,鈥� almost as if a stay-at-home mother could not be expected to achieve something noteworthy. Housewife, if not a derogatory term, carries with it the flavour of ordinariness, of a mundane life confined to household duties.
Yet Munro proved she was not ordinary, and her stories explore the extraordinary in the lives of so-called ordinary people. She has received the ultimate literary prize for her achievements.
It gives cause to wonder how many more world-class artists, writers, inventors and scholars live among us, unrecognized and unappreciated. We are quick to heap praise on celebrities from other places, but slow to recognize the gifts and achievements of more familiar people. Greatness, it seems, is more recognizable from a distance than it is up close.
Munro鈥檚 achievement teaches us to persevere, to be unafraid of taking the road less travelled. And it reminds us to be willing to accept that talent and genius could be close by 鈥� perhaps those whom we dismiss as 鈥渙rdinary鈥� people are not so ordinary, but people whose extraordinary stories have not yet been told.
