"The Beggar Maid" is the title story of its own collection (1991), an interwoven set of stories about Flo (the mom) and Rose (the daughter), whose interactions are so much the stuff of ordinary life that readers feel assured, from the first lines of a tale, that Munro has been sneaking peaks at their own lives and is, deliberately, gossiping about their (the reader's) own intimate goings-on.
Munro's great appeal--or so it seems to me--is the "homeliness" of her characters. They are people we know, so real that you can't help but think they're drawn from Ms. Munro own neighbors and friends. In "Beggar Maid" we meet Rose, a clearly gifted first-year college students who is not at all sure about her own strengths. which makes her less than able to feel at home with the attentions of Patrick, a young man we recognize immediately as a rich kid, a graduate student in history, who is as unsure as she is about her place in life.
Their relationship is the substance, really, of the story. You could say that Alice Munro's "The Beggar Maid" is a love story because it is about love--sort of, or at least enough about love that we recognize its limits in their stuttering attempts to help each other build a relationship. Of course, the way things go, it's not a love story--exactly. Its two main characters don't end up together, despite the familiar shenanigans they suffer in tryin--oh, so hard. They're kids, even Patrick, the grad student, who is as immature as Rose is about love and identity.
Central to their immediate differences is their caste: Patrick is the son of wealthy parents from Vancouver, including a father who seems disgusted with Patrick's silly notions about a profession. Rose is a duck out of water at Patrick's house, just as alien as Patrick feels in Rose's baloney sandwich world.
Class conflict is at the heart of things in "The Beggar Maid," but it's far from Munro's major fascination. Some may well fault Munro for her excessive examination with character, an examination accomplished at the expense of keeping the story moving. She fully expects that our interests, like hers, lie with the characters, rather than plot. If you get bored with "The Beggar Maid"--it's a long, long story--it's because Munro so adores her characters that she just can't say enough about them. If you too love Munro's characters, you'll love "The Beggar Maid."
Her fascination with these two simply doesn't end, and when it doesn't, a reader unfamiliar with Munro will get a good sense of her ability to stretch a short story into a novel, not simply by amassing words, but by moving unobstructed into a character's future, years and years, to etch out one or two more anecdotes from the story, in this case, of this woebegone relationship.
Years later, Rose, who has gone on to become a famous Canadian journalist, spots Patrick, whose taken over a position in his father's businesses, in a faraway Canadian airport. Munro can't quit on these two. Their mutual acknowledgement of each other doesn't end up in a bedroom or a fight or some muted awkwardness. It's simply a momentary look, that's all, a look that Rose can't help but think is right out of Patrick's old playbook.
Was it? Munro is too good a writer to bring closure, and, that she doesn't just makes the whole story more distressingly human. You can't help but smile.
"The Beggar Maid" is a great story about two masterfully created characters who don't live on the page as fully as they will in your memory and your heart.
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How about, for next time--if you're reading along--"The Moons of Jupiter"?
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