You are supposed to admire authors for what is universal rather than what is local in their work, but it is hard to avoid admiring Mrs. Gallant for something she probably regards as a minor aspect of her writing: her ability to evoke precisely the lives of Anglo-Saxon Protestants in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, her best stories and her new short novel amount to a unique chronicle of the Quebec Anglo-Saxons, and for this reason, among others, she should be valued by Canadian readers.

Her new book, My Heart is Broken, contains eight stories and a novel of one hundred pages, Its Image on the Mirror. The narrator of the novel is a woman, Jean Duncan, who has grown up inside a suburban Montreal Anglo-Saxon world and who sees this world with both affection and self-criticism….

Its Image on the Mirror suggests a new...