Canadian-born Alice Munro has established herself as one of the world's finest contemporary short story-writers. Since the publication of her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, she has tantalized a steadily expanding readership with her ability to present, "ordinary life so that it appears luminous, invested with a kind of magic." In Alice Munro: A Double Life, the first full-length biography of Munro, Ross charts the development of Munro as a wife/mother and serious writer, and her struggle to balance the demands of this "double life."