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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: A Story
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection
With hardly any notice, foolish and plain housekeeper Johanna flees her employer and sets off to find the man she’s fallen in love with. Little does she know that her correspondence with him has been a complete fabrication, a cruel teenager’s idea of a practical joke. So, who will Johanna find when she steps off her train with the household furniture in tow?
Alice Munro is the universally celebrated master of the contemporary short story, the Chekhov of our time. Nowhere are her powers better on display than in this exquisitely crafted story exploring the wonderful and unexpected places where love, or the illusion of it, can lead. This selection is the title story of Munro’s acclaimed collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and the basis of the 2013 film, Hateship Loveship.
An ebook short.
With hardly any notice, foolish and plain housekeeper Johanna flees her employer and sets off to find the man she’s fallen in love with. Little does she know that her correspondence with him has been a complete fabrication, a cruel teenager’s idea of a practical joke. So, who will Johanna find when she steps off her train with the household furniture in tow?
Alice Munro is the universally celebrated master of the contemporary short story, the Chekhov of our time. Nowhere are her powers better on display than in this exquisitely crafted story exploring the wonderful and unexpected places where love, or the illusion of it, can lead. This selection is the title story of Munro’s acclaimed collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and the basis of the 2013 film, Hateship Loveship.
An ebook short.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
59 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 1, 2016
116 people are currently reading
104 people want to read
About the author
Alice Munro
238 books6,609 followersCollections of short stories of noted Canadian writer Alice Munro of life in rural Ontario include
Dance of the Happy Shades
(1968) and
Moons of Jupiter
(1982); for these and vivid novels, she won the Nobel Prize of 2013 for literature.
People widely consider her premier fiction of the world. Munro thrice received governor general's award. She focuses on human relationships through the lens of daily life. People thus refer to this "the Canadian Chekhov."
(Arabic: أليس مونرو)
(Persian: آلیس مانرو)
(Russian Cyrillic: Элис Манро)
(Ukrainian Cyrillic: Еліс Манро)
(Bulgarian Cyrillic: Алис Мънро)
(Slovak: Alice Munroová)
(Serbian: Alis Manro)
People widely consider her premier fiction of the world. Munro thrice received governor general's award. She focuses on human relationships through the lens of daily life. People thus refer to this "the Canadian Chekhov."
(Arabic: أليس مونرو)
(Persian: آلیس مانرو)
(Russian Cyrillic: Элис Манро)
(Ukrainian Cyrillic: Еліс Манро)
(Bulgarian Cyrillic: Алис Мънро)
(Slovak: Alice Munroová)
(Serbian: Alis Manro)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 22, 2024
4.5~5★
“Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture.”
And there we have it. Munro has given us a setting, a character, and the beginning of what we think she has planned. The stationmaster becomes a bit exasperated with her questions and demands for assurance that the furniture will be properly looked after. He remarked to himself later that she reminded him of a nun he’d met.
“This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around.”
In fact, Johanna does have a streak of this, but she is a housekeeper, so doesn’t have the freedom to do what she likes. Her previous employer died and she’s now taking care of an older man and his teenaged niece, who is moving out. Johanna wishes she could have that kind of freedom.
The niece and her friend laugh at Johanna and get up to some terrible mischief, which leads to her going to the train station.
Johanna has a pretty jaundiced view of the world, and to be fair, it’s easy to see why, given her life so far. She inherited her late employer’s good, long coat, but now she needs a new dress.
“She opened the door and went inside.
Right ahead of her, a full-length mirror showed her in Mrs. Willets’s high-quality but shapeless long coat, with a few inches of lumpy bare legs above the ankle socks. They did that on purpose, of course.
They set the mirror there so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies, right away, and then—they hoped—you would jump to the conclusion that you had to buy something to alter the picture. Such a transparent trick that it would have made her walk out, if she had not come in determined, knowing what she had to get.”
Munro puts us into people’s heads better than so many writers. Of course, with stories like this, you have to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself, but really, the whole thing is here.
Her books and stories are everywhere (it seems), and you can read many online. Go on – do it! There’s a reason Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
LitHub's list of 25 Alice Munro Stories You can Read Online Right Now
“Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture.”
And there we have it. Munro has given us a setting, a character, and the beginning of what we think she has planned. The stationmaster becomes a bit exasperated with her questions and demands for assurance that the furniture will be properly looked after. He remarked to himself later that she reminded him of a nun he’d met.
“This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around.”
In fact, Johanna does have a streak of this, but she is a housekeeper, so doesn’t have the freedom to do what she likes. Her previous employer died and she’s now taking care of an older man and his teenaged niece, who is moving out. Johanna wishes she could have that kind of freedom.
The niece and her friend laugh at Johanna and get up to some terrible mischief, which leads to her going to the train station.
Johanna has a pretty jaundiced view of the world, and to be fair, it’s easy to see why, given her life so far. She inherited her late employer’s good, long coat, but now she needs a new dress.
“She opened the door and went inside.
Right ahead of her, a full-length mirror showed her in Mrs. Willets’s high-quality but shapeless long coat, with a few inches of lumpy bare legs above the ankle socks. They did that on purpose, of course.
They set the mirror there so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies, right away, and then—they hoped—you would jump to the conclusion that you had to buy something to alter the picture. Such a transparent trick that it would have made her walk out, if she had not come in determined, knowing what she had to get.”
Munro puts us into people’s heads better than so many writers. Of course, with stories like this, you have to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself, but really, the whole thing is here.
Her books and stories are everywhere (it seems), and you can read many online. Go on – do it! There’s a reason Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
LitHub's list of 25 Alice Munro Stories You can Read Online Right Now
May 15, 2024
Munro’s story-telling mastery is without compare. She was able to create such vivid characters in complex plots living what appears to be simple lives.
January 4, 2021
Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument.
This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around.
She felt a fool for mentioning a wedding, when he hadn’t mentioned it and she ought to remember that. So much else had been said—or written—such fondness and yearning expressed, that the actual marrying seemed just to have been overlooked. The way you might speak about getting up in the morning and not about having breakfast, though you certainly intended to have it.
He went to bed with his mind made up to prosecute.
He belonged to a generation in which there were men who were said not to be able even to boil water, and he was one of them.
Yet when she thought about Johanna’s going off out west she felt a chill from her past, an invasive alarm. She tried to bang a lid down on that, but it wouldn’t stay.
Then you ticked off the counted number on your fingers, saying, Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage, till you got the verdict on what could happen between you and that boy.
Breasts. They must have started growing before she went away, but Edith had not noticed. Maybe they were just something you woke up with one morning. Or did not.
However they came, they seemed to indicate a completely unearned and unfair advantage.
Drink had played a part, you had to admit that. And the idea that life should be a more heroic enterprise than it ever seemed to be nowadays.
This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around.
She felt a fool for mentioning a wedding, when he hadn’t mentioned it and she ought to remember that. So much else had been said—or written—such fondness and yearning expressed, that the actual marrying seemed just to have been overlooked. The way you might speak about getting up in the morning and not about having breakfast, though you certainly intended to have it.
He went to bed with his mind made up to prosecute.
He belonged to a generation in which there were men who were said not to be able even to boil water, and he was one of them.
Yet when she thought about Johanna’s going off out west she felt a chill from her past, an invasive alarm. She tried to bang a lid down on that, but it wouldn’t stay.
Then you ticked off the counted number on your fingers, saying, Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage, till you got the verdict on what could happen between you and that boy.
Breasts. They must have started growing before she went away, but Edith had not noticed. Maybe they were just something you woke up with one morning. Or did not.
However they came, they seemed to indicate a completely unearned and unfair advantage.
Drink had played a part, you had to admit that. And the idea that life should be a more heroic enterprise than it ever seemed to be nowadays.
December 24, 2015
This is an excellent short story. I suppose it could be called a twisted romance, the standard happy ending comes about by a mixture of mischief and opportunism.
Alice Munro can draw characters well with few words. You can see all of them and their behaviour, however unusual, is always exactly what they would do in the circumstances, while still giving the reader plenty of surprises.
Alice Munro can draw characters well with few words. You can see all of them and their behaviour, however unusual, is always exactly what they would do in the circumstances, while still giving the reader plenty of surprises.
March 15, 2023
not particularly up my alley but the perspective shifts were nicely done!
July 4, 2024
A very fine story teller! The people and their particular worlds came alive - all stages of life, love, marriage - just wonderful. Will be reading all of her books!
February 8, 2025
While I appreciate the writing, none of the stories remained with me. None made any impression.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews