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She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.” This line from W.B. Yeats comes to mind whenever I read reviews of Alice Munro's work. It is great to see people agreeing with you. It is very moving to see the gestures of admiration and respect afforded to Munro from committees and gatherings of the great and the good. She was recently awarded the third-ever Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. She will be honoured by fellow writers, including Alistair McLeod and Richard Ford, at the Vancouver International Writers Festival in October. Her star has never been higher.

But there is a hesitation in the silence at the end of Yeats's line, an intimation that praise, though appropriate, might be also beside the point. There is a part of me that listens to the response Munro's work now elicits and says, “Would everyone be quiet a minute, and read.”

Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro, McClelland & Stewart/Douglas Gibson, 303 pages, $32.99

Perhaps I am jealous, in the old-fashioned, Old Testament, sense of the word. I want to keep this work, that has kept me company all my writing life, close to my own heart.

And though it is great to see Munro's reputation reach new heights, we have to remember that her work begs a larger point about reputation itself; about how we break and remake the literary canon. If her stories prove anything, it is that the whole idea of “importance” means very little in the relationship between the good writer and the good reader.

Most importantly, these stories are not asking for our praise, they ask for our attention. They are not written for the crowd, but for the individual reader. They don't ask for noise, but for silence – and not an awed silence at that (though awe is certainly possible), but the silence that happens when you close a book and pause and continue with your life, less lonely than you were before.

Munro's work famously resists the critics. Some say that this is because she writes about life itself, unmediated by literary technique or pretension, but actually there are many different ways of writing about “life itself.” The sense of transparency comes not just from the clarity of her prose, but also from the fact that Munro's characters belong to communities, where certain things are known and other things are not known. The stories have the feel of talk; their shape comes from a sense of “the way life goes,” about how a character turns out, or who turns up.

This kind of story-making requires continuity and stability, and though you might think this could not happen, or happen so well, in any country other than Canada, you might also say that the stories create their own stable worlds. The women characters make relationships and families, the way women do; they also make themselves, and they learn lessons along the way about the success and limits of their labours.

“ Memory is a great and moral tool for this writer, the way it allows our past to be freshly revealed to us by events in the present ”

The lesson often comes in the form of an accident, or the intervention of fate. There is murder in three of these stories, two characters have genetic anomalies, there is a near-fatal fall during a family picnic, and a broken ankle sustained during a walk through the bush. Munro continues her conversation with the gothic – after all, she seems to say, these are the things that interest us, when we tell stories – but though the events are extreme, the endings are quiet. She goes to great lengths to achieve this, sifting through the possible, terrible, outcomes to find one that is less facile and more true. The man with his broken ankle does not die in the bush – why kill a character when you can teach him a lesson, instead? In fact the very plot devices that writers use to make their characters lives more difficult, like coincidence and synchronicity, work in his favour. Things are better, not worse, than he had assumed. In the end, he makes sense of his experience is by finding a word that had eluded him – once the sense of danger is named, he feels more safe.

Too Much Happiness is, to my mind, one of Munro's strongest collections, though these kinds of judgment fade into irrelevance when you look at the span of her work. Some themes have shifted or evolved over the years – her early stories are often about people who leave, or fail to leave, these later stories are more concerned with interlopers; characters who arrive and disrupt.

You can see the influence of Flannery O'Connor rise like a pentimento through the prose, though Munro offers her characters a different kind of redemption.

In Free Radicals, the arrival of a brutal stranger in Nita's house elicits a story from her. The story is a lie, but it is also a kind of expiation. Sins and the way to cure, or be rid of, them are a theme here too.

Munro's work often concerns the past, but something still niggles about her relationship with history. Perhaps the problem lies in the difference between a past that is anchored in living memory and a past that floats free of it. Memory is a great and moral tool for this writer, the way it allows our past to be freshly revealed to us by events in the present. Because of memory, our lives shift and make sense at the same time. This might be a definition of what it is to grow; it may also be why Munro's stories are living things that refuse to be still on the page.

The most salutary thing, for her fellow writers, is the way that Munro, buffeted by our adulation, has carried on doing exactly what she always has done, with scarcely a wobble on the high wire. Of course, she might deny that there is a wire, she might say she is just walking on the ground. But it is a mistake to think that writers don't know what they are doing; in my experience, they know very well.

The argument over Munro's work, if there ever was one, was mostly about the short story as a form. It was not about whether the work was good, but whether such good work could ever be important. Well, duh! It turns out that good and important are the same thing, after all. If you are interested in “important,” of course, which Alice Munro is not.

Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for her novel The Gathering. Her recent book of stories is called Yesterday's Weather.