Her husband sexually abused her daughter from the age of nine, but she refused to leave him and blamed the victim. Now a horrific conspiracy of silence is being uncovered…

With her brutally honest stories of childhood trauma, sexual awakening and boring, lifeless marriages, few could write as powerfully about human nature and relationships as Alice Munro.

But until her death in May at the age of 92, fewer and fewer people knew that the Nobel Prize winner for literature harbored a dark secret that tore her own family apart.

Just two months after being hailed in obituaries as one of the greatest short story writers, the daughter of literary star Munro shocked many admirers with the revelation that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine.

Worse still – and far worse for an author known for her sensitive and insightful portrayals of relationships between mothers and daughters – was that Munro chose to stay with her paedophile husband even after he was convicted of his crimes because she “loved him too much”.

Andrea Robin Skinner, 58, says the truth was suppressed for decades not only by her family but – because of her mother’s fame – by “many influential people” who knew something about what happened but said nothing. Yesterday Andrea said on Facebook that the “focus of my story is the danger of silence”.

Munro’s second husband, cartographer Gerald Fremlin, first abused Andrea one night in 1976 at her Canadian mother’s house in Ontario, where she was spending her summer vacation under joint custody with Andrea’s father.

Fremlin “climbed into the bed I was sleeping in and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old.”

Describing herself as once a “happy child,” she recalled, “The next morning I couldn’t get out of bed. I woke up with my first migraine, which over the years developed into a chronic, debilitating illness that continues to this day.”

She remembers Fremlin, then in his fifties, driving her to the airport when it was time for her to return to her father, Jim Munro, in Victoria, British Columbia.

“In the car, he asked me to play a game called ‘Show Me.’ When I said no, he made me tell him about my ‘sex life’ and coaxed details out of me about innocent games I played with other children. Then he told me about his sex life.”

Andrea, the youngest of Alice Munro’s three daughters (a fourth died shortly after birth), told her stepmother Carole about the abuse. Carole alerted the girl’s father. Jim, a bookseller who had married Alice in 1951 but separated from her in 1974, did not tell his ex-wife.

He also instructed Andrea’s much older sisters, Sheila and Jenny, to keep it a secret from their mother, saying the acclaimed writer’s needs were “greater than the needs of his child.”

All of them, Jenny admits today, were intimidated by Munro’s growing literary fame.

Andrea was also afraid that her mother would “blame me if she ever found out” because she was already paranoid and believed that Fremlin would choose her daughter over her.

Just weeks after the Nobel Prize winner’s death at the age of 92, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner described the allegations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a shocking essay.

This meant that Andrea was subjected to further sexual abuse for years when she returned to her mother’s house every summer.

Fremlin, who had once been an aspiring poet, repeatedly exposed himself to her, masturbated in front of her, and made advances to her.

“When I was alone with Fremlin, he would make lewd jokes, expose himself during car rides, tell me about the little girls in the neighbourhood he liked and describe my mother’s sexual needs,” she wrote in the Toronto Star this month.

Alice Munro’s behaviour was, in its own way, just as horrific as Fremlin’s. When Andrea was 11, former friends of Fremlin told Alice that he had exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter.

When Munro confronted him about it, he denied it, and when asked about Andrea, “he assured her that I was not his type,” she says.

“In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past were not as ‘prudish’ as ​​ours and that it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by having sex with adults.

“My mother didn’t say anything. I looked at the floor, afraid she would see my face turning red.”

By the time she reached her teens, Andrea no longer held the same appeal for Fremlin as before, but the ordeal left her suffering from bulimia, insomnia and migraines, and she had great difficulty at university.

In 1992, Andrea, then 25, broke the family “conspiracy of silence” after Alice Munro told her about a story she had read about a girl who committed suicide after being sexually abused by her stepfather.

Munro asked her why she thought the poor girl had not told her mother. A month later, Andrea wrote to her mother and told her what had happened to her as a child.

As always, her daughter says, Munro turned the scandal around and made her the victim. She accused her first husband of keeping the abuse secret to humiliate her. But then she admitted that Fremlin had confessed to her that she had maintained “friendships” with her children, which left her feeling “betrayed.”

She reacted “as if she had found out about an affair.”

Munro “was overwhelmed by the feeling that she had hurt herself,” Andrea recalls. “Did she realize that she was talking to a victim – that I was her child? If so, I couldn’t sense it.”

Meanwhile, Fremlin threatened to kill Andrea if she went to the police. He wrote to her father and stepmother, claiming that she was a nine-year-old “adulteress,” a “Lolita” seeking “sexual adventures.”

Amazingly, he did not apologize for abusing a girl, but for his “infidelity” towards Munro.

Despite this, after a brief separation, Munro returned to Fremlin, whom she had met at university and married in 1976, and remained with him until his death in 2013.

“She said she was ‘told too late,'” Andrea says, “that she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame for me expecting her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and make up for men’s mistakes. She insisted that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

In 2002, Andrea – who had become a yoga teacher and now works as a therapist with child abuse victims – had twins and told her mother that Fremlin was never allowed near them. When Munro complained that it would be a “terrible inconvenience for her” as she couldn’t drive, Andrea “exploded” and refused to have anything to do with her anymore.

The literary world, however, continued to be enamored with her and two years later Andrea could no longer remain silent when Munro told a newspaper interview that Fremlin was the great love of her life and that she was so lucky to have him, adding that she had a “close relationship” with all her children.

Alice Munro, represented by her daughter Jenny Munro, receives her Nobel Prize in 2013 from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden

Andrea went to the police, armed with the compromising letters Fremlin had sent. When arrested, Munro shouted angrily that Andrea was a liar, according to a police detective. In 2005, he admitted to indecently assaulting her, but given his age of 80, he got off with two years’ probation and was banned from contact with children under 14 for two years. The case attracted virtually no media attention.

So who knew about Alice Munro’s terrible secret?

“Everyone,” says Andrea’s stepmother Carole. She recounted being at a dinner party with a journalist who asked her, “Is this true?” to which she replied that it was true.

Both Munro’s publisher and his celebrated biographer admit they knew about it in 2005. The latter, Robert Thacker, kept quiet because he “considered it a private matter” and believed Fremlin, not Munro, was the perpetrator.

Her friend Margaret Atwood, the acclaimed author of A Handmaid’s Tale, insists she only recently learned the “horrific” details. “Why did she stay? Believe me,” she says. “I think they came from a generation and a place where things were swept under the rug.”

She added: “You realise you didn’t know who you thought you knew.”

As the literary world rushes to “reevaluate” a revered writer, a Canadian university and her hometown are rethinking their memorials to Alice Munro, leaving many fans simply reconsidering whether they can read her books again.

This adds another name to the long list of endless debates about whether it is really acceptable to appreciate great art while simultaneously condemning its flawed creator.