ne of my favourite stories by Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro is about a mother whose daughter disappears from her life. In Silence, Juliet takes her 21-year-old daughter from a retreat where her daughter has spent six months. When she arrives, she’s told by the manager that her daughter has left the retreat to go on a journey of “spiritual growth.”

She has not said when she will return. Weeks later, Juliet, an accomplished television presenter, receives a postcard from her daughter with no return address. Months and then years pass, and the daughter, Penelope, does not appear. By the end of the short story, Juliet has accepted that she may never meet or speak to her daughter again.

Juliet does not understand her daughter’s decision and because the story is told from her perspective, neither do we. When Juliet is trying to understand Penelope’s behaviour, she does not recall anything her daughter said or did to show any resentment or anger.

But Munro deploys her genius to drop subtle clues for the reader. Juliet looks back on the death of Penelope’s father in a fishing accident and recalls that her daughter showed little emotion. Juliet also recalls the tense relations between her and Penelope’s father, a prawn fisherman, in the days before his death.

Juliet sells their house soon after the death and moves from the remote coastal town to a city, turning her back on her old life. The reader senses that neither Juliet nor her daughter grieve properly.

We see that maybe Penelope had to suppress a great deal growing up – including her childhood - because her mother was not ready to receive her daughter’s emotions. Perhaps she was neglected as her mother became busy with her work and the success that followed.

Maybe Penelope’s departure for spiritual growth is a repudiation of the worldly success her mother attained in the city and an affirmation of her father’s ‘simple’ life in rural Canada. Munro, with measured economy and subtlety, indicates just enough about the complexity of their lives and relationships to keep us guessing.

When I read the story, I felt deep compassion for Juliet, but even though Munro does not convey Penelope’s perspective throughout the story, we sense that the daughter has her reasons. A deep, unresolved mystery pervades until the end of the short story, and the reader is perfectly alright with that because Munro reminds us that all our relationships are mysterious. Perhaps none more in the world than a mother and daughter? So even though there is no answer, I finished the story deeply satisfied. That’s how I have felt at the end of all of Munro’s stories.

Now, with Munro’s own daughter’s startling revelations, I wonder if I will ever feel the same way about her work.

A few weeks after Munro died in May of this year, her daughter revealed that her stepfather, Munro’s second husband, sexually abused her when she was nine years old, and Munro chose to stay with him even after he admitted to it. Her daughter, Andrea Skinner, wrote in a Canadian newspaper that she first told her mother about the abuse when she was in her 20s, but her mother reacted to it as she would to an “infidelity.”

Years later, when Skinner had twins and told her mother that she did not want her stepfather around her children, instead of understanding and appreciating her daughter’s decision, Munro resented the inconvenience she claimed it would cause her.

Munro’s many admirers are shocked and disappointed by her callous reaction to her husband’s abuse of her daughter. Some say they feel betrayed. Other admirers, including her eldest daughter have said that while her behaviour was deeply damaging, it does not detract from the fact that she was a great writer, a master of the short-story, a literary genius who “checkmates Chekhov” as one reviewer put it.

That she is a great writer cannot be denied. But can we read her stories, especially a story such as Silence about a rift between mother and daughter, without thinking about what she did to her child?

Many of Munro’s stories are about ordinary and flawed women. The stories are told from their perspective, as they strive in the world, in mostly quiet ways but with strong, even violent emotions always simmering at the surface.

They take chances, make false assumptions and encounter moments of surprising discovery and sometimes self-realisation. In Munro’s stories, the events that trigger these reckonings are often subtle, sometimes mundane, but immediately relatable. A character that was perhaps blind to something becomes aware, sometimes momentarily, of their limited perceptions.

Don’t we know it? The moments when we see the truth about ourselves and sense the possibilities that could open up before we quickly close that opening like we would a window to keep out a chilly late winter/ early spring breeze.

Perhaps it is because Munro’s stories are about women in search of authenticity that we find it so hard to come to terms with her actions. So many of her stories are about women who are struggling with not only what it means to be a daughter, wife, mother, worker, caregiver and bread-earner, but also, more fundamentally, what it means to be human - to deal with human aspirations constrained by relationships and moral and social codes at a time when these codes are in flux.

Although the vast social changes, especially around gender roles that Munro witnessed in her own lifetime, do not directly emerge in her stories, we know that her characters are living through these cultural transformations. In each of these stories we sympathise and relate to the characters because we see the world from their perspective and believe that they are looking for truth, even though they are themselves often the biggest obstacle in this quest.

Silence is third of a trilogy in the 2004 Runaway collection with Juliet as the central character. In the first story, Chance, Juliet is a twenty one year old scholar of classics who is travelling by train to Vancouver to take up a temporary teaching assignment. During the train ride she has a brief but intense encounter with a man.

Eric is married to a woman who has been paralysed since she was injured in a car accident eight years ago. Six months after this encounter, Juliet, now done with her temporary teaching assignment, decides to go to the town where the man said he lived. She has no invitation. One ambiguous letter from him during her six-month teaching stint is enough to fortify her resolve. When she finds his house, he is not there. So she spends the next few hours waiting for him with awful apprehension.

She learns from his neighbours that his wife has just died. When he appears, we are almost as relieved as she is when he says, “You’re here,” as if he was expecting her all along. Juliet, to whom we are introduced as a bookish young woman immersed in the classics and naïve about the real world, took an astonishing chance – and somehow, it worked.

In the second story, Soon, we see Juliet lives with Eric in his town and is the mother of their baby. Again, she is taking a trip, this time to visit her parents. Her mother is ill and her father has left his schoolteacher job and is now growing and selling vegetables. Juliet always thought that her parents were different from the others in their small town, with their intellectual pursuits and unconventional beliefs.

Her father, in particular, was her intellectual companion and encouraged her love of the classics, but now with his turn to farm life and her mother’s inclination to religion, she senses a shift. Her father has hired an assistant, Irene, whom Juliet begins to see as her replacement. She is offended by this because she thinks she and the assistant could not be more different.

Juliet with her academic training, her secular worldview, her refusal to marry her baby’s father, is the opposite of the traditional, no-frills, outdoor worker, Irene. Why is her father so taken with her then? But one may ask similar questions of her – why is she so taken with a fisherman, raising her child in a remote town and why has she apparently abandoned her study of the classics.

She does not let the irony of her disdain sink in. When a priest comes to their home one day to visit her mother, Juliet cannot hide her contempt for his beliefs. By the end of the story, we see that Juliet has perceived a gulf between her and her parents that she does not want to bridge.

In each of these stories, Munro develops a complex, contradictory character with far more subtlety and depth than the summaries above convey. Juliet, like many of Munro’s characters, seems to get some things right and many things wrong but it is compelling precisely because she is trying to forge an independent life while being true to herself.

Just because we love her stories for their truth-seeking characters does not necessarily mean that Munro had much in common with them. When I read her stories, including Silence, I did not know she was estranged from her own daughter. Now that I do, I ask myself if Juliet’s bafflement portrays how Alice Munro dealt with her own relationship with her daughter.

Did Munro delve into her past and try to find reasons for her daughter’s withdrawal while refusing to confront the actual reason, the obvious one that was too difficult to acknowledge?

Did she, like Juliet, see her daughter’s actions as a betrayal because that was the only way to come to terms with her own behaviour? Did she wish that she could, like Juliet, be ignorant of the real reason and be left to speculate rather than know that she was the betrayer? Did she sympathise with herself the way she does with Juliet?

Is it possible that Munro, with her ingenious insight into human nature refused to see her own failure to protect her daughter? And if she did grasp it, did she see herself the way she wants us to see her characters: flawed, navigating life through limited perceptions and self-deceptions, until they come to a revelatory moment, which may change their life, but not always? Sometimes, there’s not much we will do with a revelation if we are not ready for change.

Maybe it would have cost Munro, the prolific writer of great literature, too much to change a carefully constructed domestic life even when she knew how much it cost. Perhaps it’s not possible to be a great writer and let in too much of the messiness of family life – needs, resentments, slights and, in this case, incest.

It’s surely rare for a woman of her generation to have the kind of domestic life that would be conducive to writing. Perhaps once Munro attained that with her second husband, she did not want to let it go.

Some of Munro’s great contemporary women writers similarly had fraught personal lives. Doris Lessing, the author of perhaps the greatest feminist novel (although she herself detested the label), The Golden Notebook, and winner of the Nobel prize, left her two young children in Rhodesia when she moved to London as a young woman to start her literary career.

Another great chronicler of the transformations of the post-World War II era and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, French memoirist Annie Ernaux, divorced her husband and father of two children and said once in an interview that it is very difficult to be married and also be a writer. Is there a price to be paid when a writer gets a ‘room of one’s own?’ And who pays it?

We will never have the answers and can only speculate. But I imagine that the kind of person who appreciates Munro’s work is more interested in the questions than the answers anyway.

The writer is an advocate of High Courts of Pakistan