Another great Munro story - The Beggar Maid

Posted yesterday on Alice Munro's story Royal Beatings and as I read further in her 1996 Selected Stories I see that Royal Beatings was the first (I guess) in a series of stories about Rose - in R B she is growing up in a small town, Hanratty, Ontario, very much abused by her stepmother and her feckless father, intelligent and somewhat ashamed of the crudity of her family and her town. The next two stories int he collection follow Rose along in stages of her life, though the stories are very different - one, White Swans, is pretty short, for Munro, and concerns only one day, one incident - Rose, a high-school student it seems, has won an academic prize that involves a train trip to Toronto - story begins with dire warnings about the white slavers and others she might meet - general fear of the city and of crowds - we learn that in Ontario she wants to buy various beauty enhancements that she's ashamed to buy in Hanratty because her stepmother would learn of it from the store clerk - so there's a lot of sexual tension at the outset - on the train an older man fondles her, and most of story is about her fear - of him, and of the sexual feelings he is arousing in her - and then as is so typical of Munro the story leaps forward in time as she always remembers this awful man but never saw him again. The next story, much longer, The Beggar Maid, is one of Munro's great early stories (1978 - I think it may have been the first Munro story I read, maybe true for other US readers, too): this one follows Rose over the long arc of her life, beginning as she enters college and a grad student falls in love with her and pursues her avidly - she goes along with the courtship, but it's clear that the ardor is all his. He is very wealthy, so everyone thinks she's made a good catch - though she is seemingly indifferent to his wealth. His family, we learn, is loathsome - but when they marry they are pulled deeper into the orbit of his family, which of course blows apart the marriage. Again, the ending flashes far forward in life and involves a chilling scene of a silent encounter in a public space - a trope Munro returns to in some of her most recent stories as well. This great story is also imbued with sexuality, with social class, with coming of age, with marriage and death - so much here, again, one of those stories that could have been a novel, Munro's throwaways are more significant than the chapters of so many other writers, but it's most impressive and near-perfect in its current form as short fiction.