Educators wonder how to teach the writings of Alice Munro in wake of daughter's revelations

Educators in Canada and beyond are now rethinking her life and work following revelations that Munro declined to leave her husband after he had sexually assaulted and harassed her daughter.

For decades, Robert Lecker has read, taught and written about Alice Munro, the Nobel laureate from Canada renowned for her short stories. A professor of English at McGill University in Montreal, and author of numerous critical studies of Canadian fiction, he has thought of Munro as the “jewel” in the crown of her country's literature and source of some of the richest material for classroom discussion.

But since learning that Munro declined to leave her husband after he had sexually assaulted and harassed her daughter, Lecker now wonders how to teach her work, or if he should even try.

“I had decided to teach a graduate course on Munro in the winter of 2025,” Lecker says. “Now I have serious questions whether I feel ethically capable of offering that course.”

Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Munro and James Munro, wrote in the Toronto Star earlier this month that she had been assaulted at age nine by Munro’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin. She alleged that he continued to harass and abuse her for the next few years, losing interest when she reached her teens. In her 20s, she told her mother about Fremlin’s abuse.

But Munro, after briefly leaving Fremlin, returned and remained with him until his death in 2013. She would explain to Skinner that she “loved him too much” to remain apart.

When Munro died in May at age 92, she was celebrated worldwide for narratives that documented rare insight into her characters’ secrets, motivations, passions and cruelties, especially those of girls and women. Admirers cited her not just as a literary inspiration, but as a kind of moral guide, sometimes described as “Saint Alice.” A New York Times essay that ran shortly after her death, by Canadian author Sheila Heti, was titled “I Don’t Write Like Alice Munro, But I Want to Live Like Her.”

“No one knows the compromises another makes, especially when that person is as private as she was and transforms her trials into fiction,” Heti wrote. “Yet whatever the truth of her daily existence, she still shines as a symbol of artistic purity.”