'Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic'

Many of the obituaries of author Alice Munro mention the Brontës. From The Globe and Mail:

Munro has created a complex world that nourishes readers in different ways as they too love, suffer and cope with life’s inevitable exigencies. The stories themselves don’t change, but we intuit new insights with each rereading, a quality that Virginia Woolf recognized in an earlier literary artist, Charlotte Brontë.

In Woolf’s 1916 essay (collected in Genius and Ink) to mark the centenary of Brontë's birth, she wrote about “the peculiarity which real works of art possess in common.” When reading Brontë, Woolf argued that it was impossible “to lift your eyes from the page” because she “has you by the hand and forces you along her road, seeing the things she sees and as she sees them. She is never absent for a moment, nor does she attempt to conceal herself or to disguise her voice.” That is the reaction I have when I read Munro: that she is, as Woolf said of Brontë, “primarily the recorder of feelings and not of thoughts.”

Munro explained her process in a rare onstage interview in 2008 with Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker. She said that she imagines her stories visually (a quality that Woolf admired in Brontë's writing) often focusing on an image or an incident or the effect characters may have on each other. And then she might sit and stare out the window for days “just letting things get settled in my head” before struggling to write anything down. (Sandra Martin)

From The Times:

She wrote verses, worked at an endless outlandish novel, and, aged 14, seized with delight upon Wuthering Heights, a chance arrival from the Book of the Month Club. 

From Time magazine:

Munro fell in love with reading as a young girl, and started writing poetry after she discovered Alfred Tennyson’s work. One of her favorite books was Wuthering Heights. (Annabel Gutterman)

From CNN:

Born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Munro grew up on what she described as the “collapsing enterprise of a fox and mink farm, just beyond the most disreputable part of town” in a 1994 interview with “The Paris Review.” Amid familial struggles, Munro found an escape in reading as a child. Her early enthusiasm for renowned writers such as Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, among others, reflected an appreciation for literature beyond her age.

“Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic.” she told The Guardian of her childhood reading habits. “Books were so important to me. They were far more important than life.” (Yahya Salem)

And maybe we can mention this old post of ours.