ABSTRACT
The most important thing Alice Munro's stories do for her readers is to heighten our consciousness of coexistence strangeness and ordinariness, so that everything is at the same time both 'touchable and mysterious'. Lives of Girls and Women as its title suggests has the stories of many women's lives, chronicled by Del Jordan as she writes her own life story of growing up in Jubilee to the point where, like so many adolescent protagonists in Canadian women's fiction, she decides to leave her hometown. Del in Lives and Rose in The Beggar Maid are the inheritors of this tradition of repression and guerrilla warfare practised within the bounds of social conformity, but their difference is that through their intelligence and educational opportunities they chance to deviate openly from gender stereotypes, resisting not only the maxims of the masculine tradition but also of feminine cultural traditions, imagining newer and more ambitious plots for their own life stories.
