Revelations by author Alice Munro’s youngest daughter that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and that Munro stayed with the abuser even after he was convicted of the assault, reverberated in Canada and across the literary world Monday.

The story, told by Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner, in an essay in The Toronto Star and reported by the same newspaper, left many of Munro’s admirers reeling, wondering how a writer of her stature was able to keep such a secret for decades and how the revelations might impact her towering legacy.

“Alice was always kind of Saint Alice,” said Martin Levin, the former editor of the books section at The Globe and Mail. He heard “not even the faintest whisper or hint” of the news in his 20 years at the paper, he said.

For decades, Munro has been revered for her sharply observed short fiction and her insights into human nature and relationships. Even as she won the Nobel Prize in 2013, Munro remained private and unassuming, and described her life in a small town in Ontario as ordinary, quiet and happy.

That image of Munro, who died in May at age 92, shattered Sunday.

On social media, a cascade of writers and journalists, including Lydia Kiesling, Brandon Taylor and Jiayang Fan, expressed shock and heartbreak at the news.

Others, including novelist Rebecca Makkai, wondered whether from now on it would be possible to divorce Munro’s transcendent writing, which occasionally explored tumultuous domestic circumstances and sudden estrangements, from her troubling behavior.

“These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions,” Makkai said in an email. “To me, that makes them unreadable at all.”

Skinner wrote that the abuse began when she was 9 years old and went to visit her mother and stepfather, Gerald Fremlin. He climbed into bed with her, Skinner wrote, and sexually assaulted her. She told her stepmother, Carole Sabiston, who told Skinner’s father, Jim Munro. He decided not to tell his ex-wife, Alice. Skinner wrote in The Star that Fremlin continued to expose himself to her for years.

When Skinner was in her 20s, she told her mother in a letter what Fremlin had done. Skinner wrote that Munro reacted “as if she had learned of an infidelity.”

Fremlin wrote letters to Skinner’s family, describing the abuse but blaming her. Years later, Skinner wrote, she took the letters to the police.

Fremlin was charged with sexual assault in 2004 and was later convicted of that offense, according to the Ontario Provincial Police.

Munro remained with him. She and Skinner became estranged and never reconciled.

News of the guilty plea didn’t appear to travel far beyond the small courthouse in Goderich, Ontario, where the case was heard. It didn’t even reach Wingham, the village in Ontario where Munro was born, said Verna Steffler, 84, a longtime friend of Munro’s.

But after Fremlin’s death in 2013, Munro did change her plans to be buried near him in the nearby township of Blyth. Steffler said that when she heard of the change, she thought, “Well, she doesn’t want to be anywhere near him.”

In her essay, Skinner indicated that people beyond the tight family circle were aware of the abuse.

“Many influential people came to know something of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false,” Skinner wrote.