Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the followingessay, she compares the three adult characters in Munro's story and examines their relationship to the past.

In the decades since her first collection of stories was published, Alice Munro has established herself as one of the preeminent contemporary writers of the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor—primarily for her skilled storytelling and her evocation of a specific region—and even the short fiction of the great Russian writer, Anton Chekhov. When Dance of the Happy Shades was published in 1968, it immediately garnered critical praise for its author, and she won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor General's Award. Since this auspicious beginning, Munro has produced a solid body of...