The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

by Alice Munro

Paperback, 1991

Call number

FIC MUN

Collection

Publication

Vintage (1991), Edition: Reissue, 210 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. Short Stories. HTML:WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 In this series of interweaving stories, Munro recreates the evolving bond between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. the other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger worl

User reviews

LibraryThing member archipelago6
This is one of those books that I will go back to for the rest of my life. I first read it in my early 20s, and since then I have been picking it up and reading bits of it whenever I needed a lift. If I make it to old age, this will be one of the books that I bring to the nursing home with me.

I
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love how these stories follow Rose through the course of her life - from childhood beatings through to affairs, divorce, children, and middle age. Munro is fantastic at creating plot within each story, but also on a larger scale throughout the collection. Her writing is beautiful and she is a brilliant psychologist and philosopher making so many astute statements about life and people. I love how everyday moments and details become so revealing and important in her work. I highly recommend this book.
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LibraryThing member japaul22
Alice Munro's book, published in 1978, is best described as a collection of short stories that connect to create a novel. I wouldn't say that each short story/chapter would necessarily stand very well completely on it's own, but each story does focus on one major life event of the main character,
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Rose, and her step-mother, Flo. Taken all together, they feel like a novel in that the main characters develop through each story and the stories create a fairly complete picture of a life. However, there isn't the same pull of action throughout the work or closure that you would normally find in a novel, which keeps it feeling like short stories. Also the focus on one aspect of life in each chapter, like childhood friends, parent/child relationship, the life of a marriage, etc., remind the reader that these are short stories. I found it a very effective way to write this particular story and thought Munro did it much better than some other authors who've attempted it.

Rose herself was not my favorite person and certain sections of the book left me a little cold, but I was so intrigue by the writing style and format that I still very much enjoyed the book and would love to read more of Munro's work. I'm not usually a short story fan, but this structure really worked for me.
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LibraryThing member williecostello
This is a fantastic short story collection, and a striking exhibition of Munro's remarkable talent. The book's ten stories all revolve around a single main character, but should not be confused for ten chapters of a novel. Rather, the stories feel more like a selection of snapshots of a single
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life, with plenty of empty space left in between. That is, what we find in this book is not any grand story arc, but rather acute observations of a person at various moments in her life. It is a powerful fictional medium, and one in which Munro excels.

The stories I enjoyed most were "Mischief", "Providence", "Simon's Luck", and the titular "Who Do You Think You Are?"... but that probably says more about me and my penchant for Munro's portrayals of love than about the stories' own merits. Really, it feels like this collection, like life, has something in it for everyone. Every reader would do well to pick up this book and see what they find.
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LibraryThing member Kristelh
Interconnected short stories of Flo and Rose by Canadian author. Story set in Canada. A work of feminist literature. While I am not crazy about feminist literature and i do enjoy works that show aging.
LibraryThing member amyfaerie
A wonderful collection of linked short stories. I think it's Munro's best work.
LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater
Alice Munro can do no wrong at this stage. Another beautifully human book, near flawless.
LibraryThing member AngieK
I have read this collection about once a year since I discovered it in 2002. It could possibly fall into that category of "favorite book" if I were able to confess to having such a thing.


The Beggar Maid is a collection of short stories about the same characters, Rose and Flo, and if there is one
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central character it would have to be Rose. It follows Rose from her working-class Canadian childhood through adulthood which includes everything from anonymous suburban marriage and motherhood to being a famous TV personality.


It's hard for me to even say why I love this book so much, except to say it's probably the most real book I have ever read.
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LibraryThing member vanpelten
In this series of interweaving stories, Munro recreates the evolving bond between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. the other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow leaves the
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small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

Rose and her stepmother, Flo, live in Hanratty-across the bridge from the "good" part of town. Rose, alternately fascinated and appalled by the rude energy of the people around her, grows up nursing her hope of outgrowing her humble beginnings and plotting an escape to university.

Rose makes her escape and thinks herself free. But Hanratty's question Who Do You Think You Are? rings in her ears during her days in Vancouver, mocks her attempts to make her marriage successful, and haunts her new career.

In these stories of Rose and Flo, Alice Munro explores the universal story of growing up-Rose's struggle to accept herself tells the story of our lives.
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LibraryThing member chrisblocker
Munro is a fabulous storyteller. Her characters and language are absolutely radiant. I really loved this collection/novel and look forward to reading more of her work.
LibraryThing member grheault
Short stories set across the years, focused on the lives of two women, this is a novel in a peculiar form which I like very much. When I recall The Beggar Maid, read several months ago, I see it in sepia. I see it in the late 40's, a general store, narrow brick houses with steep pitched roofs,
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little towns in rural Ontario. Scrappy people, making ends meet, going to the big city Toronto, and beyond. Flo is the wisecracking stepmother, and Rose is the stubborn child, and father is set between them. Reading these vignettes is like sitting around the table after a funeral, looking through a picture album of family photos spanning several decades, with oldsters telling stories about what was going on back then, and the rest of us listening. Well done. These are my kind of people.
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LibraryThing member Hebephrene
As others have pointed out, this the book where Munro taught herself the style that made her who she is as a writer. The work is not as polished as later stories but the essence of Munro's approach is here, the fascination with contradiction in character, the generosity towards difficult contrarian
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personalities, the ambivalence towards the lost eden which wasn't eden at all. These are linked stories told by a close third narrator that favors Rose, the girl who left Hanratty, the small town where she lived under the rule of her eccentric step mother Flo while upstairs her father died. Flo is immaculate as a character and it is her strong presence that allows the stories to jump in time and location, because it only takes Flo opening her mouth for us to be returned to the through line. The themes of loneliness, of a fragile minutely observed identity being forged by disappointment, all comes to fruition. But to me the most outstanding story was Wild Swans where Munro has a young girl - Rose of course - traveling by train only to be abused by the priest sitting next to her. She isn't abused, really, but his hand is touching her furtively and the way Munro takes that one moment and explodes to give us everything this girl feels about sex and love and imposition is startling. The capacity for digging deeper into a character - which is what forms so much of Munro - is seen here for the first time (to my knowledge) and like other masterpieces, sets the stage for a whole writing career. It is also why so many writers study Munro and why she continues to amaze in her plain spoken way. Really thrilling to read.
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LibraryThing member steller0707
Alice Munro's award-winning book is a set of very loosely, but Chronological stories about Rose, who grows up poor in a small rural Western Ontario town. The stories, which can be read stand-alone but which are satisfying to read in order, are periods in Rose's life -- from her home life with her
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step-mother Flo and her father, her early school and high school days through marriage, motherhood, divorce, and making a livelihood. Those are the nuts and bolts. In the stories are the hopes, dreams and disappointments of becoming a woman.

I knew I would love this book because Alice Munro is one of my favorite authors. Her settings are of her home in rural Ontario as well as big city life in Toronto. It's a geographic area I know well, from my many wanderings there from my WNY home. These settings are familiar and comfortable. Although Munro is, perhaps, a generation older than I am the customs and mores of coming of age - shopping at Woolworth's, painting fingernail polish so as to leave a half moon at the base, fashions, school - a long forgotten, more innocent time, in some ways, and yet all too familiar. Then there the feelings and emotions that always vividly define Munro's women characters - making her way in work, marriage, motherhood; the complex emotions, the thoughts - all expressed so beautifully. Sometimes it's just a phrase, sometimes a mood. They strike a chord. Are they nostalgic? Yes, in many ways, certainly. But also, I think, universal.
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LibraryThing member sidiki
Alice Munro never disappoints. There are times when I am amazed at how beautifully and with such ease she records such subtle mannerisms, traits and behavior of people in certain situations. Her manner of writing and choice of words is remarkable.
LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
The novel-from-a-collection-of-short-stories form rarely produces a perfectly satisfying novel as such. Inevitably the stories vary somewhat in tone and effect. Some are more immediate, more powerful than others. Some seem to focus on minutiae, while others sweep across time and space. The form is
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inexact, capricious, unpredictable, and demandingly tentative. How perfect, then, that Alice Munro chooses the form for a character, Rose, who herself is in a constant state of becoming, of self doubt, full of false bravado and troubling anxiety. Rose flits one way and then the next, changing course as quickly as she changes locale (from Ontario to Vancouver and back). But always she is wondering, I suppose, as the title story suggests, who she thinks she is. Her answers vary, sometimes contradict, and ever, ever return her to her childhood in Hanratty, a town in southwestern Ontario.

Rose grows up in hard poverty in West Hanratty. From the royal beating she receives from her father in the first story, “Royal Beatings,” to the airs and persona she takes on at school to her initial plunge into falsehood in marrying a man she knows she does not love in “The Beggar Maid,” Rose is both our focus and our challenge. Munro dotes upon her, perhaps loves her as a character, but she sees her whole, flaws and all. And that honest baring of Rose’s broken sense of self is what holds us, or at least held me, riveted through her false starts at love, her disappointments, and ultimately all the way back to Hanratty, if only as an orbital fly-by. Rose is “of” Hanratty, but not bound to it and her fate, such as it is — and this includes an acknowledgement that possibly all of her actions and choices have been wrong — her fate remains her own.

There is so much here in these ten stories. And yet, you’ll feel like you’ve only just scratched the surface of who Rose is.

Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
I think I've read one other book by Alice Munro, but after she won the Nobel Prize several years ago I've wanted to read more, although she primarily (exclusively?) writes short stories, not my favorite, as I've said often enough.

This book consists of what are referred to as the Flo and Rose
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stories, and I believe they are stories that have for the most part previously appeared elsewhere. These interwoven stories tell us of the lives of Flo and Rose (step-mother and step-daughter) over 40 years, and read together feel like a novel in short stories. The stories are presented roughly chronologically (as measured by the lives of Flo and Rose), beginning when Rose is just a young child, and ending with Flo in the throes of dementia. The early stories take place in the small Ontario town where Rose grew up in poverty. Later, Rose goes out into the wide world to make her way while Flo remains behind. Yet the ties that bind them stay strong in ways good and bad. This is a wonderful collection, and although the stories were written at various times over the years, there is an inherent consistency and unity in them.

Highly recommended.

4 stars
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LibraryThing member eas7788
What a shock: I loved an Alice Munro book.But she does such things with time/plot--the jumps forward and back, the narrating of what typically happened/what happened this time. The reversals. The way the ends witch everything -- i think in particular of Mischief and Who Do You Think You Are. Or the
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moment on the library stairs and the very last line of Beggar Maid: those two bits are so complex and inevitable, yet so simple. The stories definitely talk to each other--by the time we get to Simon's Luck, we are rooting for her to leave town. The moments with Flo are SO GOOD. The youth stories are SO GOOD. And yes, so little "happens," but if you want an example of tension vs drama, there it is. And so little "happens," but there is so much change.
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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50
Who Do You Think You Are (also known as The Begger Maid) is a book of interconnected short stories by Alice Munro. The stories are told by Rose in an anecdotal manner and as we read these tragicomic stories we learn of her life in rural small-town Ontario, her relationship to her step mother, Flo
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and as she grows and spreads her wings we learn of her aspirations and dreams.

The seemingly simple stories cover some forty years beginning when Rose is a small child growing up in a poor household. Each story covers a different period in Rose’s life, from her home life with her step-mother and father, to her early school days as well as her time in high school and college. Her first serious relationship and on to her marriage, motherhood, and divorce. Each story adds another layer to the life of this woman.

This is the second book by Alice Munro that I have read and I have been surprised at how much I liked both of them. The author has a way of putting words together that paint a clear and definitive picture. She doesn’t shy away from describing embarrassing moments and her writing makes it clear that she knows human nature. There are a lot of similarities between the author’s own life and that of Rose which served to make the book all the more intriguing.
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LibraryThing member bodachliath
I had never read Alice Munro before, so I am grateful to The Mookse and the Gripes group's project revisiting the 1980 Booker shortlist.

This book is difficult to categorise, and is somewhere between a short story collection and a novel. I can see why the Booker jury chose to accept it as a novel,
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because the stories are all episodes in the life of one woman, Rose, and they are arranged in a chronological sequence, but each could equally be read as a self-contained story.

Rose's mother died when she was young, and the dominant figure in the early stories set during her childhood is her stepmother Flo, who runs a shop in a poor district of a small Canadian town. Her education allows her to escape, but the last couple of stories see her sucked back as she deals with Flo in old age.

These are quiet stories with fairly humdrum subject matter, but Munro is a master of telling detail, and the whole adds up to something universal, effective and moving.
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LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd
A collection of interconnected short stories, read for the AAC. Flo is Rose's stepmother, and we get vignettes of their lives over several decades, from Rose's childhood to Flo's dotage, and it's all quite compelling. Flo reminds me of my mother-in-law (also a Canadian), who has a platitude for
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every situation and a fairly pessimistic attitude toward most things, despite having lived a comfortable life with no more than the ordinary sort of trials and tribulations. Rose manages to break out of the confining small-town she grew up in, to live in the wider world, where she finds love affairs and creative outlets, disappointments and satisfactions. Both women are as real and alive as people I've met in person, so sharply drawn I can hear them speaking in my head. Munro's talent is both subtle and stunning. I love her writing.
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Pages

210

ISBN

0679732713 / 9780679732716
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