‘It’s not about you, dear reader’: On Alice Munro’s moral failures

Samuel Johnson once wrote that in order to teach everyone to speak the truth, everyone likewise should learn to hear it. Yet there are times when a wall of silence builds up around the truth. Such a wall of silence came crashing down last month, shortly after the death of Canadian writer Alice Munro.

Munro died in May this year, aged 92, after a long and celebrated writing career, the pinnacle of which was the Nobel Prize for Literature. A month after her death, her daughter Andrea Skinner published a personal essay in a Canadian newspaper. She wrote that in 1976, when she was nine years old, her stepfather Gerald Fremlin had sexually abused her. The child told her stepmother and her father Jim Munro. Inexplicably, her father did nothing to stop the abuse, confront the perpetrator, or even talk to his ex-wife Alice Munro about it. As a child, Skinner continued to be sent to her mother’s house every summer. Fremlin continued to harass Skinner.

In 1992, at the age of 25, Skinner wrote a letter to her mother telling her that Fremlin had abused her. “I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened,” she wrote. Munro left...

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