Mavis Gallant
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Mavis Leslie Gallant, CC, née Young (born 11 August 1922) is a Canadian writer.
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[edit] Biography
An only child, Gallant was born in Montreal, 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). It was during this period that she married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician. The couple soon divorced. Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing.
Gallant has been forthright about the protectiveness she feels towards her 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 Mavis 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.
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 collected under one cover to form a collection.
[edit] 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. As well, because of her heritage and understanding of Acadian history, she is often compared to Antonine Maillet, considered to be spokesperson for Acadian culture in Canada.
In a 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.”
[edit] Major works
Gallant has written two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1969) 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), 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).
[edit] Current life
Although she maintains her Canadian citizenship, Gallant has lived in Paris, France since the 1950s.
Gallant's life in Paris is spent writing her stories and in participating in the occasional gallery opening and gala opening night exhibits. She assiduously reads daily newspapers in German, Italian, French, and English, and had occasionally (and reluctantly) granted an interview until 2006, when she participated in two feature-length television documentaries : one in English for Bravo! television titled Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant and one in French, as part of a series entitled Contact, the Encyclopaedia of Creation, 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 honored 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.
[edit] 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
[edit] External links
- Mavis Gallant at The Canadian Encyclopedia
- Williams, Kathy. "Genesis Of A Story: Mavis Gallant Describes The Creative Process Behind Her Award-winning Stories." Aurora Online, 2001.
- Gallant, Mavis. “Diary: A Weeklong Electronic Journal.” Slate magazine online, August 1997.
- Gallant, Mavis. “Contact, the Encyclopaedia of Creation”, December 2005: interview transcript (French), video excerpts, and exclusive photographs.
