Canadian author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Alice Munro writer spent the 1960s living in Victoria, during which time she and her late husband Jim Monro opened opened Munro’s Books. A copy of Munro's Nobel Winning book is displayed in the store in Victoria on May 14.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
The view from the room where Alice Munro famously wrote her early work is magnificent, especially for a laundry room: Looking out over the Victoria neighbourhood of Rockland’s Garry oaks, you can see all the way to the Olympic Mountains. The vista couldn’t be farther from the Southern Ontario small towns she’s best known for writing about.
The sunny second-floor room is still a laundry room today, and the house is still a haven for the arts. Ms. Munro’s former husband, Jim Munro, lived there until his death in 2014 and his widow, Carole Sabiston, still lives there. From that grand manor, reportedly designed by a young Francis Rattenbury, who went on to design the Empress hotel and the B.C. parliament buildings, among other Victoria landmarks, Ms. Munro launched her successful and enduringly influential career – though it was never a place where she truly felt at home.
“She thought this house was much too grand,” Ms. Sabiston said. “She didn’t like pretension.”
All the same, the city as a whole benefits from the association.
“We like to claim her,” Mayor Marianne Alto told The Globe and Mail on Tuesday as word of Ms. Munro’s death spread. “The heart of many of her stories is all about the heart of the people, and her challenging stories, her complicated stories, her stories that were built on the complexity of relationships … all those are relevant to the story of the city today: How are we going to live with each other in times of declining civility?”
The writer spent the 1960s living in Victoria, during which time she and Mr. Munro opened Munro’s Books. The imposing neo-classical former bank with the grand columns and vaulted ceiling may bear her married name today, but it isn’t the same store she worked in. Their original store had a different aesthetic (its former tenant was Foster’s Furs) and a more modest address, a few blocks away on Yates Street.
They carried mostly paperbacks, an unusual choice for the time, and were early adopters of the countercultural literary output coming from San Francisco. Today it’s a hair studio next to a defunct bar.
“They were certainly very hip and cool at that time,” said Jessica Walker, now a co-owner of the store after Mr. Munro turned the place over to a group of employees in 2014.
The book store's current, downtown Victoria location with grand columns and vaulted ceilings may bear Munro's name today, but the original store had a different aesthetic and a more modest address a few blocks away.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
While Ms. Munro’s role in the store’s history may have been overstated at times, it’s not as though she wasn’t present, Ms. Walker said. “She put in her time behind the counter.”
Her bookstore era evidently stuck with her. She wrote about life behind the counter in a few stories, including The Albanian Virgin, a story that appeared in The New Yorker in 1994. She wrote, in the voice of her bookstore-owning narrator, about the pleasant parts (Victoria was “like a town in a story,” where “not much doing” was a welcome, calm refrain rather than a sign of slow business), and the artifice, the “fakery for tourists” that still persists today in the same horse-drawn carriages she called “almost insulting.”
She wrote about the frustration of having people come into the store searching for a specific, long-forgotten title, ignoring the “riches all around them,” and about the sensation of having regular customers become friends whose names she’d never learn.
When Ms. Munro visited Victoria in her later years, she routinely stopped by the Government Street location for book signings and to chat with the staff. One of those staffers was Deborah Willis, who, when she wrote Vanishing and Other Stories, received a blurb from Ms. Munro. (“The emotional range and depth of [Ms. Willis’s writing], the clarity and deftness, is astonishing,” Ms. Munro wrote.)
As it happened, she was visiting Victoria when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, accepting the award in a video interview shot here, instead of in person. That wasn’t unusual; she wasn’t known as someone who sought out the spotlight.
Ms. Walker handled much of the media the day of the Nobel announcement, and she did the same on Tuesday after the announcement of Ms. Munro’s death, when reporters and camera operators manoeuvred unwieldy tripods between the shelves. There were no visible signs that shoppers had heard the news, or that they had even made the connection between the store and the author at all.
It was a contrast to Ms. Munro’s life, where her name ensured a steady flow of attention. Ms. Walker said fans regularly send letters to the store, or visited on pilgrimages from Japan or Germany – as if Munro’s Books, with its grandeur all out of sync with the small-town life she chronicled, and its growth from modest beginnings to unmissable landmark, was the physical manifestation of a woman who doesn’t live here any more.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the name of the book by Deborah Willis that received a blurb from Alice Munro.
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