Mavis Gallant has established an extensive reputation as a writer of highly crafted short stories and novels. Her fiction draws on the techniques of Chekhov, Joyce, and Mansfield for its sensitive evocation of setting and its exacting delineation of character. Often she portrays English, American, or Canadian expatriates living unsatisfactory or limited lives on the Continent, but she has also written movingly of Europeans, particularly Germans, "exiled" after World War II in their homeland. Her most recent stories deal with the French and explore the weakening of authentic human response as a result of the trivializing of the potential for collective thought and action. Her characters give the impression of trailing in the wake of great civilizations whose imprint can still be felt faintly as an ordering principle, but which no longer acts as a positive stimulus to action.

Memory plays an important part in Gallant's fiction, and...