Mavis Gallant: A Canadian Short Story Legend

Mavis Gallant was a Canadian short story writer. She had faced a very difficult childhood after her father’s demise and her mother’s early remarriage. She was raised as an orphan and had attended seventeen different schools to complete her education. Mavis Gallant later on started writing stories in Canada, and publishing them in Preview, The Standard Magazine, and Northern Review. Some of them were rejected as well but, she was determined to write stories as a full time writer, and therefore she courageously decided to depart from Canada, and settled in Paris until her last breath. This paper is an attempt to show light on her life, the struggles she came across, her writing style and moreover the issues that she cover in her fictional stories for the readers to think and act accordingly in the present times.

The true voice of a Canadian expatriate: Mavis Gallant, Home truths (1981)

Mavis Gallant is a typical contemporary Canadian short story writer, who has strongly contributed to the formation and the proliferation of the contemporary Canadian short story. Her short story collection Home Truths (1981) is a good example of the exploration of time. Gallant has said on several occasions that she is not particularly interested in discovering typical Canadian elements, but she wishes, above all, to convey the truth. She does not get deeply engaged in the psychological development of her characters, but is interested in specific situations, in reconstructing the state of mind and heart, therefore, we find her writing on the edge of imagination and reality. Home Truths is about identity, alienation, and the importance of memory. These issues still are, 30 years after the publication of this collection, a matter of great concern among Canadians at home and abroad.