Mavis Gallant
Encyclopedia
Mavis Leslie Gallant, , née Mavis Leslie Young (born 11 August 1922) is a Canadian
writer.
, Quebec
. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. Gallant received her education at seventeen different public, convent, and French-language
boarding schools. In her twenties, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944–1950). She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician in 1942. The couple divorced five years later in 1947. Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing.
Gallant has been candid about her need for autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction magazine in 1978, she discussed her “life project” and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing.” In the preface to her collection of stories, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), she uses the words of Boris Pasternak
as her epigraph: “Only personal independence matters.”
In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada
for her contribution to literature; that year, she received the Governor General's Award
for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto
. Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. in 1991. She was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada
in 1993.
In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize
, and in 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story
. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
With Alice Munro
, Gallant is one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appear in The New Yorker
. Many of Gallant’s stories have debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.
history, she is often compared to Antonine Maillet
, considered to be a spokesperson for Acadian culture in Canada.
In her critical book Reading Mavis Gallant, Janice Kulyk Keefer
says, “Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience.”
In a review of her work in Books in Canada in 1978, Geoff Hancock asserts that “Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian. But, like buried treasure, both the author and her writing are to discover.” In the Canadian Reader, Robert Fulford has said, “One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James
, Chekhov
, and George Eliot
dance across the mind.”
, France
since the 1950s.
Gallant's life in Paris is spent writing stories and participating in the occasional gallery opening and gala opening night exhibits. She assiduously reads daily newspapers in German, Italian, French, and English, and had only occasionally granted interviews until 2006, when she participated in two television documentaries: one in English for Bravo! television
, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant, and one in French
, as part of the series CONTACT, l’encyclopédie de la création, hosted by Canadian broadcaster Stéphan Bureau
. Gallant was honored at Symphony Space in New York City on November 1, 2006, in an event for Selected Shorts
-- fellow authors Russell Banks
, Jhumpa Lahiri
and Michael Ondaatje
honoured her and read excerpts from her work, and Gallant herself made a rare personal appearance, reading one of her short stories in its entirety.
On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David
from the government of her native province of Quebec. She is the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
writer.
Biography
An only child, Gallant was born in MontrealMontreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. Gallant received her education at seventeen different public, convent, and French-language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
boarding schools. In her twenties, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944–1950). She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician in 1942. The couple divorced five years later in 1947. Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing.
Gallant has been candid about her need for autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction magazine in 1978, she discussed her “life project” and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing.” In the preface to her collection of stories, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), she uses the words of Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
as her epigraph: “Only personal independence matters.”
In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada is a Canadian national order, admission into which is, within the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, the second highest honour for merit...
for her contribution to literature; that year, she received the Governor General's Award
Governor General's Award
The Governor General's Awards are a collection of awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, marking distinction in a number of academic, artistic and social fields. The first was conceived in 1937 by Lord Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction who created the Governor...
for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
. Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. in 1991. She was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada is a Canadian national order, admission into which is, within the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, the second highest honour for merit...
in 1993.
In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize
Matt Cohen Prize
The Matt Cohen Prize is an award given annually by the Writers' Trust of Canada to a Canadian writer, in honour of a distinguished lifetime contribution to Canadian literature...
, and in 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story
Rea Award for the Short Story
The Rea Award for the Short Story is an annual award given to a living American or Canadian author chosen for unusually significant contributions to short story fiction.-The Award:...
. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
With Alice Munro
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize...
, Gallant is one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appear in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. Many of Gallant’s stories have debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.
Critical assessment
Grazia Merler observes in her book, Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, that “Psychological character development is not the heart of Mavis Gallant’s stories, nor is plot. Specific situation development and reconstruction of the state of mind or of heart is, however, the main objective.” Frequently, Gallant’s stories focus on expatriate men and women who have come to feel lost or isolated; marriages that have grown flimsy or shabby; lives that have faltered and now hover in the shadowy area between illusion, self-delusion, and reality. Because of her heritage and understanding of AcadianAcadian
The Acadians are the descendants of the 17th-century French colonists who settled in Acadia . Acadia was a colony of New France...
history, she is often compared to Antonine Maillet
Antonine Maillet
Antonine Maillet, is an Acadian novelist, playwright, and scholar. She was born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick and lives in Montreal, Quebec....
, considered to be a spokesperson for Acadian culture in Canada.
In her critical book Reading Mavis Gallant, Janice Kulyk Keefer
Janice Kulyk Keefer
Janice Kulyk Keefer is a Canadian novelist and poet.Born in Toronto, she studied literature at universities in England and France, and currently teaches literature and theatre in the graduate studies department at the University of Guelph....
says, “Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience.”
In a review of her work in Books in Canada in 1978, Geoff Hancock asserts that “Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian. But, like buried treasure, both the author and her writing are to discover.” In the Canadian Reader, Robert Fulford has said, “One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
, and George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
dance across the mind.”
Major works
Gallant has written two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (1970); a play, What is to be Done? (1984); numerous celebrated collections of stories, The Other Paris (1953), My Heart is Broken (1964), The Pegnitz Junction (1973), The End of the World and Other Stories (1974), Across the Bridge(1976), From the Fifteenth District (1978), Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985), and In Transit (1988); and a non-fiction work, Paris Journals: Selected Essays and Reviews (1986).Current life
Although she maintains her Canadian citizenship, Gallant has lived in ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
since the 1950s.
Gallant's life in Paris is spent writing stories and participating in the occasional gallery opening and gala opening night exhibits. She assiduously reads daily newspapers in German, Italian, French, and English, and had only occasionally granted interviews until 2006, when she participated in two television documentaries: one in English for Bravo! television
Bravo! Canada
Bravo! is a Canadian English language Category A specialty channel owned by Bell Media. Bravo! is an entertainment channel with a particular focus on television dramas and films, as well as art-related programming....
, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant, and one in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, as part of the series CONTACT, l’encyclopédie de la création, hosted by Canadian broadcaster Stéphan Bureau
Stéphan Bureau
Stéphan Bureau is a journalist, TV interviewer and producer of TV shows and documentary series.- Life and career :...
. Gallant was honored at Symphony Space in New York City on November 1, 2006, in an event for Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts is an event at New York’s Symphony Space on the Upper West Side, in which actors read classic and new short fiction before a live audience. The annual season of the live events at Symphony Space begins in the mid-fall and ends in mid-spring, and a typical episode would include...
-- fellow authors Russell Banks
Russell Banks
Russell Banks is an American writer of fiction and poetry.- Biography :Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in upstate New York, and has been named a New York State Author. He is also...
, Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both...
and Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje
Philip Michael Ondaatje , OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet of Burgher origin. He is perhaps best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, which was adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film.-Life and work:...
honoured her and read excerpts from her work, and Gallant herself made a rare personal appearance, reading one of her short stories in its entirety.
On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David
Prix Athanase-David
The Prix Athanase-David is a literary award presented annually by the government of Quebec as part of the Prix du Québec to a Quebec writer, to honour the body of his or her work....
from the government of her native province of Quebec. She is the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
Selected bibliography
- The Other Paris (1956)
- Green Water, Green Sky (1959)
- My Heart is Broken (1964)
- A Fairly Good Time (1970)
- The Pegnitz Junction (1973)
- The End of the World and Other Stories (1974)
- From the Fifteenth District (1979)
- Home Truths (1981)
- What Is to Be Done? (1983)
- Overhead in a Balloon (1985)
- Paris Notebooks (1986)
- In Transit (1988)
- Across the Bridge and Other Stories (1993)
- The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996)
- Paris Stories (2002)
- Montreal Stories (2004)
External links
- Mavis Gallant at The Canadian EncyclopediaThe Canadian EncyclopediaThe Canadian Encyclopedia is a source of information on Canada. It is available online, at no cost. The Canadian Encyclopedia is available in both English and French and includes some 14,000 articles in each language on a wide variety of subjects including history, popular culture, events, people,...
- Gallant, Mavis. “Diary: A Weeklong Electronic Journal.” Slate magazine online, August 1997.
- Gallant, Mavis. CONTACT, l’encyclopédie de la création, December 2005: interview transcript (French), video excerpts, and exclusive photographs.
- Mavis Gallant interviewed by Lenny Lopate on WNYC, November 1, 2006.