“Is it true that in order to appreciate Alice Munro's stories we need to begin by looking at a map of Canada?” These are the opening words of Coral Ann Howells's excellent book on Munro's oeuvre. The answer to that question might be that a map of Canada is not really necessary to appreciate Munro's fictional worlds, but that Munro in her writing prefers to “map” a certain Canadian region: southwestern Ontario (sometimes abbreviated as “sowesto”), more specifically the area around London, close to Lake Huron.

Munro's longtime preoccupation with that particular region and her interest in local history and topography in her writing are linked to her own life. She was born on 10 July 1931 on a farm on the outskirts of the small town of Wingham, Ontario (some thirty miles from London in Huron County), the eldest of three children of a former school teacher and a fox farmer with a family history going back to Scottish pioneers. After completing school in Wingham she attended the University of Western Ontario (1949–51) in London, where she studied English and had her first short stories published in the university magazine. She married James Munro, a fellow student, in 1951, and they moved west to Vancouver. After the first of her three daughters was born, she sold her first short story to the (now defunct) Canadian magazine Mayfair in 1953 and then “The Strangers” to the radio programme CBC Anthology whose director, Robert Weaver, was to play an important role in popularizing Munro's writing in Canada. It was in the 1950s, when her second daughter was born, that Munro started to write short fiction on a regular basis and first published her stories in Canadian magazines such as Queen's Quarterly, The Tamarack Review, and Chatelaine. When Munro was twenty-eight years old, her mother died from Parkinson's disease, a painful experience which led Munro to write “The Peace of Utrecht” that summer (one of the many Munro classics today).