Different Strokes

From a distance, Carol Shields and Mavis Gallant might be seen as two leaves on the same branch of Canadian literature. There are several life parallels, including American childhoods: Shields was born in 1935 in Illinois, and Gallant, though born in Montreal in 1922, spent years shuttling between Quebec, Connecticut, and New York. Both settled early in Canada (Gallant at eighteen, Shields at twenty-two) and married young (Gallant at twenty, Shields at twenty-two). Both were tireless writers: Gallant’s professional career began at twenty-two, when she was taken on as a reporter at the Montreal Standard; Shields wrote privately and published her first story in 1962, in the British magazine The Storyteller. Gallant was in Paris selling stories to The New Yorker by the time she was thirty; at the same age, Shields had just won a CBC poetry contest. Both travelled often, and both considered mid-century Canada, to quote Gallant, “an intellectual...