SOURCE: "Mauriac and the Art of the Short Story," in François Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals, edited by John E. Flower and Bernard C. Swift, Berg Publishers, 1989, pp. 77-95.

A Welsh educator and critic, Griffiths is the author of The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870-1914 (1966), among other works. In the following essay, he examines Mauriac's short stories and argues that they should be viewed on their own terms as literary works—not simply in relation to the novels.

François Mauriac is famous above all as a novelist. The fact that he wrote a number of successful short stories appears, on the whole, to have been neglected by the critics. Far from being studied as a genre in their own right, these stories have tended to be studied entirely in relation to the novels, and to have aroused interest only in so far as...