SOURCE: Bell, Pearl K. “Rara Mavis.” New Republic 215, no. 22 (25 November 1996): 42-5.

In the following review, Bell details the autobiographical aspects of The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, spotlighting Gallant's affiliation with the New Yorker.

More than forty years ago, Mavis Gallant, then 27, was working on a Montreal weekly and struggling to write stories which only a close friend or two were permitted to read. Restless and ambitious, she came to a bold decision: she would give herself two years to see whether she could support herself entirely by writing, and if at the end of that time the foolhardy plan had turned to ashes, she would renounce the literary dream altogether—the notebooks, the good and false starts, “every scrap, every trace.” As she tells us in the preface to [The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant,] this huge assemblage of the stories that she has published with prolific...