Dance of the Happy Shades, the collection of short stories in which ‘‘Boys and Girls’’ appeared, was published in 1968. The novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971) soon followed, and a second collection of stories entitled Something I’ve Been MeanB ing To Tell You was published in 1974. In an essay written in 1978 in which these three books were discussed, critic Hallward Dahlie said Munro is ‘‘a writer who has quietly and firmly established herself over the past decade.’’ To say that Munro gained this reputation ‘‘quietly and firmly’’ seems an apt estimation. From the start, Munro’s critics approached her writing as that which deserved careful and serious consideration, whether their praise was highly favorable or more measured in its admiration. Her fiction has inspired a large and highly respectable body of scholarly criticism. By the time Dance of the Happy Shades was published, Munro had spent many years honing her talent. Thus, when this collection appeared, it was the work of a writer skilled and confident in her talents, talents that well justified the admiration they inspired. So, even if critic Frederick Busch found Munro’s art in her first collection somewhat lacking in ‘‘the thrilling economy, the poetry that makes the form [the short story] so valuable,’’ he nevertheless acknowledged that they are stories ‘‘you have to call well-made.’’ Most critics, however, greeted Dance of the Happy Shades like Martin Levin did. In Levin’s review in the New York Times Book Review, he said the ‘‘short story is alive and well in Canada’’; the ‘‘15 tales . . . originate like fresh winds from the north.’’

That Munro deserves this solid place among writers is underscored in an essay written by Rae McCarthy MacDonald in which the critic asserted that ‘‘Munro’s work bears the marks of a distinctive, vital, and unifying vision.’’ According to MacDonald, this vision is quite somber. Noting that so many of Munro’s stories feature minor characters who are ‘‘eccentrics, criminals, and the fatally ill,’’ MacDonald suggested that these marginal characters ‘‘work as a symbol or externalization of the suffering and deformity of the apparently healthy and adjusted characters.’’ However, other critics differ as to the bleakness of Munro’s vision. For instance, while Hallvard Dahlie also noted a pervasiveness of ‘‘existential terror or desperation’’ in her fiction, this ‘‘desperation’’ is, Dahlie suggested, finally offset by a concurrent development of a sense of ‘‘existential possibility within a total vision that is much closer to faith rather than despair.’’ Or, from the point of view of the famous novelist and short story writer Joyce Carol Oates Munro’s fiction is described as being so true to its subjects that it somehow ‘‘celebrate[s]’’ them; in Munro’s fiction, said Oates, there is a ‘‘wonderful variety of people . . . [whom] we always want to know more about.’’ That more critics tend to this latter view is perhaps because, as Kildare Dobbs recorded, so many of her stories ‘‘move quietly to their modest epiphanies or moral insights.’’ Certainly, stories like ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’’ or ‘‘Dance of the Happy Shades’’ (both from Dance of the Happy Shades) do work toward these deeply touching resolutions of sudden profound insight and emotional purgation (‘‘epiphanies’’), and they do also seem to capture what is most impressive about Munro’s art. Munro’s solid position within the contemporary canon of English language fiction is shown by the many essays and books that have been written about her fiction, such as Robert Thacker’s bibliography of Munro criticism, Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography, and E. D. Blodgett’s book Alice Munro which explores the complexity of Munro’s ‘‘subtly selfaware manner of narration.’’