SOURCE: Farr, Judith. Review of The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, by Mavis Gallant. America 176, no. 4 (8 February 1997): 33-4.

In the following review, Farr assesses the literary accomplishments of The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, noting the characterizations and linguistic implications of the text.

I first read Mavis Gallant when I was 16, studying French while boarding for the summer in the Woodmont section of Montreal with a dignified Anglophone lady. Over tea each afternoon, this woman complained that “English Quebec” was being overwhelmed by “foreign speakers,” often pausing to address her maid, a Quebecoise, in an accurate but brutally inflected French that seemed to say “I disdain this language but am forced to use it.” One day, while reading Gallant's acutely observant story “The Fenton Child,” I overheard two children chattering together. One spoke French, the other English. But their identical sing-song cadences, composing a kind of patois bred...