Alice Munro is Canada?s greatest short story writer. This book, the first full length study of her work published in Britain, explores the appeal of Munro?s fictions of small-town Canadian life with their precise attention to social surfaces and their fascination with local gossip and scandal. This is a world of open secrets, and Howells highlights Munro?s distinctive storytelling methods which combine the familiar and the unfamiliar, slipping between realism and fantasy to make visible what is usually hidden within everyday life. These are women?s narratives, full of silent female knowledge--of female bodies, love stories and romantic fantasies as well as female casualties. Munro takes up the traditional subjects of women?s fiction through her stories? significantly female plots, stories of entrapment and escape attempts, where secrecy and silence become strategies of resistance. Munro?s enthusiasm for the work of other women writers from Emily Brontë and L. M. Montgomery to Eudora Welty is emphasized as Munro continues to experiment with the short story form, creating worlds which are both "touchable and mysterious."