Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) is one of the great prose writers of the twentieth century, publishing well over a hundred short stories in The New Yorker along with many collections of short fiction, two novels, essays, and the play What Is To Be Done? Her many honours include the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the PEN Nabokov Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and the Prix David. She was born in Montreal, moved to Ontario and later to New York City, returning at the age of eighteen to Montreal, where she worked briefly for the National Film Board and as a journalist for The Standard newspaper. In 1950 she moved to Europe and spent most of her life in Paris.

Before she left for Europe in 1950, Gallant destroyed all the pems and stories she had been writing, along with all the diaries she had kept. In her introduction, author and publisher Linda Leith writes that, "In the Linnet Muir of the Montreal stories and in the Jenny and the Molly of the play, we have vivid portraits of young women whose hopes and fears and passions and dreams tell us as much as we may ever know about the young woman who became Mavis Gallant."