SOURCE: Simmons, Diane. “Remittance Men: Exile and Identity in the Short Fiction of Mavis Gallant.” In Canadian Women Writing Fiction, edited by Mickey Pearlman, pp. 28-40. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

In the following essay, Simmons examines the figure of the Remittance Man in Gallant's short fiction.

In a semi-autobiographical series of stories in Mavis Gallant's Home Truths, the nineteen-year-old Linnet Muir returns to Montreal after a childhood spent, from the age of four, in a series of Canadian and American boarding schools. After probing various mysteries about her family and her past, such as the circumstances of her father's death, Linnet will, like Gallant, leave Canada permanently for France.

Linnet's investigations among her father's friends—she has broken with her mother—produce several versions of her father's death, and the girl soon decides that, whatever the actual events, “he had died of home-sickness; sickness for England was...