(New York) For decades, Robert Lecker has read, taught and written about Canadian Nobel Prize-winning short story writer Alice Munro.
A professor of English at McGill University in Montreal and the author of numerous critical studies of Canadian fiction, he considers Munro the “jewel” in his country’s literary crown and the source of some of the richest material for classroom discussion.
But since he learned that Mme Munro refused to leave her husband when she learned he had sexually assaulted and harassed the writer’s daughter, and Professor Lecker is now wondering how to teach her work – or whether he should even give it up.
“I had decided to teach a graduate course on Munro in the winter of 2025,” Lecker says. “Now I’m seriously questioning whether I feel ethically able to offer that course.”
Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Alice and James Munro, wrote in the daily Toronto Star Earlier this month, after her mother’s death, she had been sexually abused from the age of nine by the writer’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin.
She alleged that he continued to abuse her over the next few years, then lost interest in her when she reached her teens. In her 20s, the young woman told her mother about Fremlin’s abuse. But Alice Munro, after briefly leaving Fremlin, returned to live with him until his death in 2013. She reportedly told her daughter that she “loved him too much” to stay apart from him.
When Munro died last May at the age of 92, she was celebrated around the world for her short stories, which documented rare insights into the secrets, motivations, passions and cruelties of her characters, especially girls and women. Her admirers cite her not only as a literary inspiration, but also as a kind of moral guide – she is sometimes even called “Saint Alice”.
Today, educators in Canada and around the world are taking a fresh look at his life and work. Western University in London, Ontario, M’s alma materme Munro recently suspended the chair program that has borne his name since 2018.
Separate the work from the artist
For the fall semester at Harvard University, authors and professors Laura van den Berg and Neel Mukherjee will teach a survey of literary works ranging from the science fiction of Octavia Butler to the “realist” fiction of Munro. But Mme Van den Berg says Munro’s lack of support for her daughter forced her to rethink her approach to the course.
“I will never read Munro the same way again, and I will never teach him the same way again,” she says. “For me, what was so painful about Andrea Skinner’s experience was the silence. And the feeling that she could only break that silence after her mother left. For me to stand in front of a group of students and read the lecture I had originally prepared would be a second silencing of Andrea Skinner.”
Kellie Elrick, a former student of Lecker’s at McGill, doesn’t know if she would have liked to have known more about these revelations. Alice Munro’s stories have enriched her life, she says, and she doesn’t regret reading them.
“I think it’s perhaps both productive and dangerous to read an author’s work biographically,” she argues. “It can allow us (readers) to think we can understand things, but there are things we can never really know about the writers’ lives and intentions.”
At Harvard, professor and writer Mukherjee is unsure whether or how to engage with recent news about Munro as she teaches the short story collection “Friend of My Youth,” which the author dedicated to her own mother.
She believes in separating “the work from the artist, because we’ve all done bad things.” She is very “torn,” sharing her colleague Van den Berg’s horror that Munro chose her husband over her daughter. But she also believes her work has perhaps acquired “greater depth, now that we know something in her life that she may have tried to come to terms with.”
“I don’t think of writers as saints,” she says.