The novelist Margaret Atwood has revealed her shock on the revelation that her fellow Canadian writer Alice Munro knew that her daughter was sexually abused by her husband—and stayed with him after discovering out the darkish secret.“It was a bombshell. I’m shocked. I’m nonetheless making an attempt to get my head round it,” Atwood, multi-award-winning writer of The Handmaid’s Story and plenty of different novels, instructed The Day by day Beast.The literary world, like Atwood, is equally reeling after Andrea Robin Skinner’s gorgeous article within the Toronto Star revealing her abuse by the hands of Gerald Fremlin—and Munro’s non-response to it.Skinner’s piece within the Star detailed years of abuse by the hands of Fremlin, Munro’s second husband who died in 2013. Skinner stated the abuse first began when she was 9 and he crept into her mattress as she slept, lasting till she was effectively into her teenagers. She finally instructed her mom about it, however the Nobel Prize winner opted to stay along with her husband as an alternative. The schism strained Skinner’s relationship with Munro by the latter’s loss of life in Might; the writer had suffered from dementia for greater than a decade.The disclosure has prompted agonizing over Munro’s legacy months after her loss of life at 92, with writers, followers, and contemporaries grappling with honoring a author whose standing as some of the lauded writers on the earth, and one of many supreme practitioners of brief story writing particularly, has been tarnished by her safety of an abuser.Atwood instructed The Day by day Beast: “It was a bombshell for me. I’m shocked. I’m nonetheless making an attempt to get my head round it. I had heard a rumor about it however only a few particulars, after Gerry was lifeless and Alice was in an establishment. “One noteworthy factor for me is that Alice was from small city southwestern Ontario at a time when such issues have been swept below the carpet as a matter after all. Now that we find out about this horrifying episode, there are clues within the work—strive her brief story, ‘The Peace of Utrecht,’ and the publicity artist in her novel Lives of Women and Ladies, and the brief story, ‘Materials.’“There are darkish secrets and techniques that come to mild in a lot of her work. I as soon as taught a course referred to as “Southern Ontario Gothic”—that a part of the world, the place Alice got here from, was very Gothic. In Graeme Gibson’s interview with Alice in 11 Canadian Novelists—which was printed in 1973, earlier than any of this occurred—the 2 of them discuss how Gothic the world of Alice’s upbringing was. Gothic could be very a lot about secrets and techniques. Crimes in cellars. The trusted individual turning out to be a werewolf. That was Alice’s real-life background. “I’ve seen the phrase, ‘the fairy-tale world of Alice Munro,’ however whoever wrote that hadn’t learn many fairy tales.”— Margaret Atwood “I’ve seen the phrase, ‘the fairy-tale world of Alice Munro,’ however whoever wrote that hadn’t learn many fairy tales. The kid deserted within the woods. The lady who runs away from residence due to the specter of incest. The daddy who steps again and lets evil prey on the kid. Little one sacrifice is the underlying motif: it retains ‘the household’ comfortable, not less than superficially.”Munro’s longtime writer Alfred A. Knopf, her longtime Canadian writer Douglas Gibson, and her former representatives at WME didn’t reply to fast requests for remark.The award-winning novelist Barbara Gowdy instructed The Day by day Beast she was “too shocked and rattled to know what I believe.”Writer, journalist, and professor Susan Swan instructed The Day by day Beast: “I’m not going to throw out Munro’s books though I believe she betrayed her daughter by not taking her emotional welfare to coronary heart. It’s a tragic, horrible and all too acquainted story, notably of Munro’s technology of moms who often wanted a husband to outlive economically. “I’m upset and saddened to study what occurred to her daughter, however I agree with the critic Claire Dederer who stated cancelling an unethical artist is a ineffective client gesture within the age of late capitalism.”— Susan Swan “As a author, Alice Munro made an excellent livelihood, but it surely seems she was nonetheless working from this outdated mind-set for girls. I’m upset and saddened to study what occurred to her daughter, however I agree with the critic Claire Dederer who stated cancelling an unethical artist is a ineffective client gesture within the age of late capitalism.”In an obituary for The Day by day Beast, printed in Might, Jessica Ferri wrote: “Maybe no different author is ready to write so richly about human emotion with so little exposition or clarification about place, time, or individuals. Munro assumes that you just perceive, and also you do. And simply while you start to surprise, she gives you with a element so nuanced that solely somebody who has made a profession of observing individuals would be capable to seize: a second that appears quiet however if truth be told vibrates for us with which means, searing our recollections till our brains cease pulsing.”Writer Joyce Carol Oates took to X on Monday to reckon with Munro’s reasoning, questioning why Munro would blame “our misogynistic tradition” for selecting to stay with the person she beloved—and admitted was an abuser. She pointed to the boys in Munro’s brief tales, pondering in the event that they have been projections of the writer’s seeming subservience to males. “Is there no room for something besides condemnatory speech?”— Joyce Carol Oates “Why can’t we focus on concepts, cultural proclivities, psychological motivations?” wrote Oates, who admitted in a separate submit that she had not learn Skinner’s piece. “Is there no room for something besides condemnatory speech? She appears to have behaved very selfishly, cruelly. That has been stated & resaid. It appears baffling, such habits. So why not attempt to perceive?”Jiayang Fan, a employees author for The New Yorker who’s set to show a category on Munro’s works, wrote on X the piece made her mirror on how finest to show Munro’s tales, together with whether or not her fictional tales have been private projections.“Will this modification the way in which I educate her tales? It is going to & it gained’t,” she wrote. “[Because] I don’t imagine writers—or the issues they write—are ever meant to be positioned on pedestals. At their finest, tales invite investigation. What’s the relationship btw the author, the violated & the violating?”Some followers have taken issues into their very own fingers. One fan posted a photograph on X of their copies of Munro’s guide in a trash bin.“As a mom, I can’t even,” the poster wrote.