News about Alice Munro

The reputation of Canada 's Nobel Prize-winning author has taken a battering since it emerged that she stood by husband Gerald Fremlin, the man who abused her own daughter from the age of nine. Munro, who died in May at the age of 92, screamed at police and told them youngest daughter Andrea Skinner was a liar when they arrived to charge Fremlin with sexual abuse in 2004. But Fremlin found himself confronted by a 'lioness' of a mother when he exposed himself to the nine-year-old daughter of family friends while staying at their home. 'I was really lucky,' Jane Morrey, now 64 said. 'I was lucky that my mom never questioned that it happened and believed me instantly.'

With her searingly honest stories about childhood traumas, sexual awakenings and dull, lifeless marriages, few could write about human nature and relationships as powerfully as Alice Munro. But until her death in May, aged 92, fewer still knew that the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature harboured a dark secret that ripped apart her own family. Just two months after she was feted in obituaries as one of the greatest short story writers, the literary star's daughter has horrified Munro's many admirers by revealing she was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine.

The literary world has been reeling since Andrea Skinner revealed last week that her celebrated mother stood by husband Gerald Fremlin after he was convicted of abusing her own daughter from the age of nine. The detective who arrived to lay charges against Munro's husband has now revealed that the Canadian author was 'yelling, she was mad' when police arrived at her Ontario home in 2004. Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich recalled being stunned at her response and said he 'couldn't wrap my head around her attitude'. 'That's your daughter. Aren't you going to defend your daughter?' he asked.

Just weeks after the Nobel laureate's death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner detailed the accusations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a harrowing essay for the Toronto Star. The Toronto Star reports that Skinner, now 58, went to the police about the abuse in 2005, when Fremlin was 80 years old. Fremlin, a cartographer, received a suspected sentence and probation for two years - with Munro choosing to stay with him until his death in 2013. Skinner, Fremlin's youngest daughter, said she wanted 'story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother.