Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant, CC (née Young; 11 August 1922 – 18 February 2014), was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France.
[1] Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young, a Canadian furniture salesman and painter who was the son of an officer in the British Army,[2] and his wife, Benedictine Wiseman.
[6] In her 20s, Gallant briefly worked for the National Film Board[5] before taking a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944–1950).
[13] Her "Linnet Muir" series of stories, which appeared in several of her books before being collected in their entirety in Home Truths, are her most explicitly semi-autobiographical works.
[14] Throughout Gallant's early career, Canadian literary critics often wrote of her as being unfairly overlooked in Canada because of her expatriate status;[1][15] prior to the 1970s, in fact, her books were not picked up by Canadian publishers at all, and were available only as rare and expensive American imports[16] until Macmillan of Canada bought publication rights to From the Fifteenth District.
[17] According to journalist Robert Fulford, the neglect flowed in both directions, as Gallant did not actually undertake any serious effort to secure a Canadian publisher until Macmillan editor Douglas Gibson approached her in the late 1970s.
[16] The Canadian publication of From the Fifteenth District did not initially quell the criticism, however, as the book failed to garner a shortlisted nomination for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction despite being widely regarded as her greatest work.
Canada, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant,[17] and one in French as part of the series CONTACT, l'encyclopédie de la création, hosted by Canadian broadcaster Stéphan Bureau.
[20] Gallant was honored at Symphony Space in New York City on November 1, 2006, in an event for Selected Shorts—fellow authors Russell Banks, Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Ondaatje honoured her and read excerpts from her work, and Gallant herself made a rare personal appearance, reading one of her short stories in its entirety.
[21] Gallant's private journals were slated for publication by McClelland and Stewart and Knopf,[22] with the first volume covering the period from 1952 to 1969, but as of 2023 have yet to appear.
"[26] In the preface to her collection Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), she used the words of Boris Pasternak as her epigraph: "Only personal independence matters.
Frequently, Gallant's stories focus on expatriate men and women who have come to feel lost or isolated; marriages that have grown flimsy or shabby; lives that have faltered and now hover in the shadowy area between illusion, self-delusion, and reality.
In a review of her work in Books in Canada in 1978, Geoff Hancock asserts that "Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian.
In the Canadian Reader, Robert Fulford writes: "One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history.
"[26] Critics have also singled out Gallant's later story "Speck's Idea" (1979) as offering a sustained engagement with the psychological appeal of fascism.
[29] The story, which is Gallant's most widely anthologized work and has been called "arguably her masterpiece," depicts an art dealer in 1970s France who seems to slowly embrace fascism.