In a characteristic mingling of modesty and fierce pride, Mavis Gallant has said that “one of the hardest things in the world is to describe what happened next.”
Margaret Atwood first discovered the work of Mavis Gallant through a story Gallant wrote for the The New Yorker about a convent school in Montreal where the girls are made to wear rubber aprons in the bath.
"I had no trouble fitting in once I arrived in Europe. I think now that I adapted very quickly to an imaginary place, as one might go through the looking glass or walk into a novel or painting."