Alice Munro’s Narrative Historicism: “Too Much Happiness” Dennis Duffy University of Toronto

Alice Munro’s Narrative Historicism: “Too Much Happiness”

• Alice Munro's short story, “Too Much Happiness,” centers on the final years of Sophia Kovalevsky (1850–1891), a 19th-century Russian mathematician, writer, and feminist figure.
• The story stands out in Munro's body of work because of its close adherence to historical fact and its use of a referential apparatus.
• The discussion examines Munro's earlier works, such as “The Wilds of Morris Township,” “A Wilderness Station,” and “Meneseteung,” to understand the generic implications of “Too Much Happiness” on the rest of her fiction.

Intertextuality and Historical Context

• “The Wilds of Morris Township” (2006) contains a memoir within it, which includes a portion of the 1994 narrative “A Wilderness Station”.