Alice Munro's heroine Rose, though said to be a successful and even "famous" Canadian television actress, returns again and again in her imagination to the claustrophobic world of her childhood and girlhood, in "Hanratty, Ontario," as if seeking a meaning—even a deathly meaning—in that otherwise ungiving environment. Though her nature is tough as a "prickly pineapple" Rose is completely vulnerable to the signals, increasingly random and weak, sent out by Hanratty; she seems in a sense never to have left, and indeed Munro is careful to end The Beggar Maid with Rose back in Hanratty, in the Canadian Legion Hall where only the past—parochial, unredeemed by an intellectual grasp of its significance—exists, and the present is quite irrelevant. (pp. 87-8)

Lives of Girls and Women, the title of Alice Munro's first volume of fiction, might well serve as a title for all her work. Again, in The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose …, Munro examines with her usual lyric precision the experience of a young girl growing up in Ontario, in a period that encompasses the Second World War and shades into the tumultous present. The stories are all succinct and expertly crafted, frequently summarized as if they were, in a sense, nothing more than flickering images in Rose's restless mind. The 'story' of The Beggar Maid is over—Rose is now telling it to herself, in fragments, as if trying to piece together the disparate shards of her own life. For though Rose has suffered innumerable humiliations in West Hanratty, particularly at the hands of her step-mother Flo (who both is, and then again is not, "crazy"), she has survived nevertheless, and has even made a career for herself in a highly competitive field. (Though the details leading up to this career are unfortunately blurred.) (pp. 88-9)

The sub-title—Stories of Flo and Rose—is misleading, for the stories are all about Rose, are in fact recounted by Rose, and Flo is seen only from the outside; and the book is really a novel, not a collection of stories, since each of the "chapters" fits in gracefully with the others, and advances the plot (which is oblique and minimal, exactly as one might recall the "plot" of one's life). The most powerful passages are those which evoke, in a single strong image, or in a few fastidiously-chosen lines, Rose's troubled relationship with her step-mother. Growing up, moving beyond Hanratty and Flo, Rose enters a dismayingly vulgar, even banal world, though it is a world of greater affluence, and one in which she achieves her "success." Munro analyzes rather mercilessly Rose's relationships with men, the naiveté of her hopes and the inevitability of her disappointments, and one comes to feel that Munro shares … the conviction that this is a time in which "men are angry with women; men are afraid of women." No one in Rose's experience (except a lover named Simon, doomed to die of cancer) impresses her with the strength of personality her step-mother had. And Flo, of course, is a "character"—intolerant, belligerent, somewhat mad. (p. 89)