SOURCE: Hoy, Helen. “‘Rose and Janet’: Alice Munro's Metafiction.” Canadian Literature 121 (summer 1989): 59-83.

In the following essay, Hoy traces the complicated publication history of Alice Munro's collection of short fiction Who Do You Think You Are? and discusses stylistic and thematic aspects of her stories.

“‘That Rose you write about? Is that supposed to be you?’”¹

I. the Genesis of Who Do You Think You Are?

Before Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? appeared in the fall of 1978, her anticipated new collection of stories was announced as Rose and Janet.² The first reviews, although about a book entitled Who Do You Think You Are?, described a collection unlike the one soon available in bookstores, the one we know. In Books in Canada, for example, Wayne Grady discussed the mirror stories of twin heroines, “Rose, who grows up in West Hanratty, Ont., the child of a defeated...