In the following essay excerpt, Howells argues that Munro reconstructs a member of the Canadian female literary tradition with Almeda, a poet who escapes from the confines of what society expects of her into the "the wilderness space of her imagination."

'Meneseteung' presents Munro's contribution to the feminist re-visionary project of reconstructing a female literary tradition by recovering the work of forgotten women writers. As Canadian critic Carole Gerson remarks in her essay on the disappearance of so many nineteenth-century Canadian women poets' names from twentieth-century anthologies,

Tired of being cheated of recognition by the literary establishment, the early Canadian woman poet has deviously begun to re-enter our literature in fictional form, in Carol Shields' Mary Swann: A Mystery and Alice Munro's 'Meneseteung'.

Munro's story about a fictive nineteenth-century woman poet who lived in the small town of Goderich in southwestern Ontario pays attention to issues highlighted...