SOURCE: Schaub, Danielle. “‘Small Lives of Their Own Creation’: Mavis Gallant's Perception of Canadian Culture.” Critique 34, no. 1 (fall 1992): 33-46.

In the following essay, Schaub analyzes the representation of a core Canadian identity and its defining values in the “Linnet Muir” narrative sequence of Home Truths.

A Canadian by birth but an exile in Paris for forty years, Mavis Gallant continues to assert her Canadian identity. This she attributes to the indelible mark left by the first years of education, in her case received in Canada. She explains that “they provide our sense of gravity, our initial view of the world, the seed of our sense of culture,” and adds, “a deeper culture is contained in memory.”¹ She sets out to prove this belief in her Home Truths, specifically in her Linnet Muir sequence. In its cumulative evocation of life in Montreal during the 1920s and 1940s, the sequence...