Munro has stated that "The Albanian Virgin" had its genesis, in part, in an unverified story recounted to her by her husband about a small-town librarian who, during a trip to Europe, was captured by bandits in Albania sometime before World War I. In fact, this single anecdote also gave rise to two other stories in Open Secrets — "Carried Away" and "A Real Life" — which can be considered related to "The Albanian Virgin" through their explorations of what Munro calls the growing sense of "alternate reality" which comes to define the lives of their female protagonists.