SOURCE: Clement, Lesley D. “Mavis Gallant's Apprenticeship Stories, 1944-1950: Breaking the Frame.” English Studies in Canada 18, no. 4 (September 1992): 317-34.

In the following essay, Clement surveys Gallant's early short fiction, maintaining that “the exposure to painterly forms and techniques that she experienced can be observed in the evolution of a visually powerful and evocative style within those short stories she wrote during her apprenticeship years.”

In his 1977 interview with Mavis Gallant, Geoff Hancock, remarking on the visual quality of her stories, conjectured that Gallant “might [have] liked to have been a painter at one time.” To this observation Gallant replied that she often imagines how she would respond to a scene were she recreating it on canvas (55). The daughter of Stewart Young, an artist whom she has described as having “an incredible sense of vocation” but “no talent,” and as painting “like a provincial, minor late-impressionist” (Corbeil 21), Mavis Gallant...