When he contracted malaria, Munro returned to England the following year and convalesced in Devonshire until he left for London in 1896 to attempt a living as a writer.
Munro's first important publication was a history of Russia. Published in 1900 to mixed reviews, The Rise of the Russian Empire was neither a financial nor a critical success. While working on this history, however, Munro published a short story, "Dogged," in the February 1899 issue of St. Paul's , a story that has never been republished despite its anticipation of the ironic reversals and awkward animals of Munro's later fiction. In the story Artemus Gibbon (Munro was still a historian) acquires a dog that drives away his friends and secures his eviction.
A second attempt at fiction in 1900 was successful. A collaboration with political cartoonist Francis Carruthers Gould produced "Alice in Westminster," a series of satires in which Carruthers' caricatures were accompanied by Munro's prose. Although Munro was a Tory, the Tory government's inept handling of the Boer War was the main target. The series as a whole was an imitation in the eighteenth-century sense: an application of an earlier literary model to contemporary life.
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