SOURCE: Gardam, Jane. “The Language of Her Imagination.” Spectator 278, no. 8805 (3 May 1997): 42-3.

In the following review, Gardam appraises the literary merits of The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant.

It is odd that Mavis Gallant, for decades publishing fiction in the New Yorker, widely translated, winner this year of the Canadian prize for a life dedicated to the arts, is not better known here. Maybe it is because in Britain we are wary of short stories and she has remained faithful to them for over half a century; or at any rate faithful to intense novels from four to 40 pages long, which is not necessarily the same thing; but short stories we call them.

She is also geographically mysterious. Born in Canada she disappeared to Paris as a young woman at the end of the second world war and it is rumoured has stayed in the same apartment and...