WCXX

^{Mavis Gallant on a visit to Montreal in 1981 (AP)}

She was born Mavis de Trafford Young in Montreal on August 11 1922, the only child of an English father and an American mother. Both her parents were Protestant, yet a few weeks after her fourth birthday they dispatched her to a French-speaking boarding school run by a semi-cloistered order of Jansenist nuns who forbade all toys and examined her English books for signs of immorality. "The only thing I remember," Mavis Gallant said later, "is my mother putting me on a chair and saying, 'I'll be back in 10 minutes'. She just didn't come back." From then on Mavis returned home only for the holidays.

When she was 10, her father, an unsuccessful artist, returned to England to die, but Mavis was not told of his death for three years. Her mother quickly remarried, to a man Mavis did not like, and moved to New York, leaving Mavis with relatives in Ontario before depositing her in various boarding schools in Canada and the United States (17 in all), an experience which she recalled "with horror".

In Youth is Pleasure, one of her semi-autobiographical "Linnet Muir" stories, Mavis Gallant recalled how she had kept waiting for her father to send for her, "for my life was deeply wretched and I took it for granted that he knew. Finally I began to suspect that death and silence can be one." She would litter her stories with betrayed, abandoned children who may not fully understand what they are seeing but have an instinctive awareness of parental bad faith. "In many, many of the things I write, someone has vanished," she told an interviewer. "And it's often the father. And there is often a sense that nothing is very safe."

The moment she turned 18 Mavis escaped to Montreal, the last place she had seen her father, thinking that "if I got geographically out of the way [of my mother] I could breathe". After a period of dogsbody work for the Canadian National Film Board, she got a job with a Montreal English-language newspaper, The Standard, where, refusing to be sidelined as a "woman writer", she became a respected feature writer, causing controversy in 1946 with a piece entitled "Why are Canadians so dull?"

In 1942 she married John Gallant, a hotel lounge pianist from Winnipeg. The marriage did not last, but she kept his name, and the pair remained on good terms.

But by the end of the 1940s, fed up with the Canadian small-town mindset, she decided to leave Canada for Europe; and in 1950, with the aid of an airline executive who provided a ticket, she arrived in Paris. For the next 25 years she travelled all over the continent, jotting down observations in her notebook.

Before leaving Canada, Mavis Gallant had been commissioned by the editor of The New Yorker, William Maxwell, to write a short story — for which she had been paid $600. During her early years in Europe she did not realise that the work she had left with her agent at home had continued to appear in the magazine. The agent had pocketed the cash while informing the magazine that she was living in Capri and did not wish to be disturbed; meanwhile, he told her that her work had been rejected. In Madrid, in 1952-53, she was forced to sell her own clothes to have enough to eat.

Equilibrium — and income — was restored after she came across a copy of the magazine with one of her stories in it, and the truth was revealed. The New Yorker would go on to publish more than 100 of her stories.

In 1954 Mavis Gallant acquired a small house in Menton, in the south of France, which remained her base until the 1970s, when she returned to her base in Paris. A period spent in Germany yielded a novella, The Pegnitz Junction (1973, her own favourite), and many stories of Germans struggling to find a post-war identity : "The streets still smelled of terror and ashes, particularly after rain," she wrote in An Alien Flower (1972). "No one was inferior, because everyone was. A social amnesty had been declared."

In the early 1970s she was commissioned to write a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, the French-Jewish war hero who fell victim to French antisemitism in the late 19th century. She never published it, but her research led her to reimagine her Canadian roots: "I was haunted by the way Dreyfus walked. I went to where he had lived and I walked over the same bridge [that he would have crossed]. I was reminded of Montreal... and I began to write the stories about the girl [Linnet Muir] who is in New York, but comes back to Montreal when she is 18. She looks at her old convent school and thinks, all you have to do is wait to grow up and then you are free."

^{Two of Mavis Gallant's short story collections}

Mavis Gallant published a dozen collections of short stories, two novels, a play and numerous essays and reviews. She was always protective of her privacy and seldom gave interviews. Until 1988, when she appeared on a French literary television show, her Paris neighbours did not even know that she was a writer.

But by the late 1970s Mavis Gallant had established a reputation in most parts of the English-speaking world — apart, that is, from her native Canada, where it seemed that many could not forgive her for preferring to live in exile. Thirty years and seven books after she began writing, Macmillan Canada ended the neglect by publishing two volumes of stories, one of which, Home Truths (1981), won the Governor General's Award. In the same year she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, advanced in 1993 to Companion of the Order of Canada.

Mavis Gallant, born August 11 1922, died February 18 2014