LMMI congratulates Montgomery admirer on Nobel Prize
The Lucy Maud Montgomery Institute (LMMI) extends congratulations to Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Munro is the first Literature laureate to base her writing career in Canada, and has cited Lucy Maud Montgomery's work as an important influence in her early life, from which she would later draw so much of the inspiration for her own peerless short fiction.
In 'Dear Life,' published in 2012 as part of a set of autographically-themed pieces described by Munro as 'the first and last-and the closest-things I have to say about my own life,' she writes of how she coped with the sometimes difficult and dirty realities of growing up on a farm:
But I was used to this and could easily ignore it all, constructing for myself a scene that was purified to resemble something out of the books I liked, such as Anne of Green Gables or Pat of Silver Bush…Fresh manure was always around, but I ignored it, as Anne must have done at Green Gables.
In an interview for the 2005 biography Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Munro told Robert Thacker that she considered Emily of New Moon, 'one of the best books in Canada.' Munro had earlier contributed an afterword to a 1997 edition of 'Emily of New Moon,' in which she talked about her intense identification with Emily's experience of the writer's life:
