SOURCE: Besner, Neil. “Reading Mavis Gallant's 1940s in the 1990s: ‘The Fenton Child.’” University of Toronto Quarterly 68, no. 4 (fall 1999): 898-908.

In the following essay, Besner explicates the “Canadian” perspective in the story “The Fenton Child,” correlating its literary achievement to contemporary Anglo-French Canadian life.

Fiction, like painting, consists entirely of more than meets the eye; otherwise it is not worth a second's consideration.

Mavis Gallant

(Mavis Gallant's ‘The Moslem Wife’ has more going on in it than five novels).

Michael Ondaatje

I

Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro both published their Selected Stories in 1996. These handsome volumes, one largely jet black, the other mostly cream white, seem to stand like magisterial bookends on a long shelf capable of accommodating Gallant's and Munro's previous work—including, between the two of them, some seventeen books of stories—and held up at either end by the twinned supports of two of our...