Alice Munro's first knockout story

The first knockout story in Alice Munro's Selected Stories (1996), and therefore most likely the first knockout story she wrote, is Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You - if you read that story from the mid-70s and you'd know that suddenly we're dealing with a major talent. 10 stories like that would make anyone's career for sure - and Munro of course went on to write several dozen  more, but this was the first: moving and shifting about through the course of the narration, she tells of the lives of two sisters, Et and Char, Char the beautiful one and Et more of a plodder and an outsider. The story, unlike many of Munro's, is essentially about 4 characters (the two sisters plus Char's husband, a school teacher much older than she, and her high-school crush, also older, scion of the hotel-owning family in the - can you guess it? - small Canadian town), but like other Munro stories it jumps around quite a bit in time so that we don't see the whole picture until the end - like pieces in a jigsaw, or like a photo gradually coming into focus. What's truly great about this story is that Munro conveys the contours of an entire life in really just 15 pages or so - you might look at this, or at many of her subsequent great stories, and think: this could be a novel. Yes, maybe it could - but it shouldn't - as she has contained a novel's worth of materials in the span of a story - greatly enhancing the capacity of this often-neglected genre. She expanded our comprehension of what the story can do - very much in contrast to the style of the time, the minimalism of Carver et al on the one hand and the postmodernism of Barthelme at all on the other - she was much more old-fashioned, but in a way more daring. To write this, and other stories, that spans an entire lifetime - and the great success can be measured by the number of astonishing details that she includes but just leaves on the margin, for mood and effect: for ex., in this story, the death of their brother by drowning, when they were about 10 years old - she does not dwell on this, but we know it has an effect on their lives, esp the elder and the responsible sister (Char), and the mother whom we see as just a dark and mournful character - she never recovered - and the way one character casually mentions that a boy once drowned her  and Char retorts: that boy was my brother - or the very brief description of him with some green grass or weeds by his mouth. Other writers would have taken pages, chapters, to convey all this - but Munro does so with just a few brushstrokes - to try again to convey her style: perhaps like a Cezanne sketch of the Provencal mountains, just a few brushstrokes to create an entire, complex landscape -for which others would have used thousands of dabs of oils.