There is something about Mavis Gallant that embodies the timeless appeal of her finest short stories. The Montreal-born, Paris-based author is 71, but might easily pass for 10 or 15 years younger. Her handsome face has a startling clarity, and her eyes, which seem to subtly change color as she talks, radiate enthusiasm and intelligence. Even her voice is youthful. Touched with the old-fashioned accents of the Anglo Montreal that she left more than 40 years ago, it summoned up lost eras as she talked in a Toronto interview about her latest collection, Across the Bridge. Her favorite story in it is “The Fenton Child,” which is set in Montreal in the 1940s. “When I was writing it, I could see things as they were in the Forties,” she recalled. “I got so involved that I didn't want to water the plants or answer the phone. Then, after a few days I went out, and for a second I was surprised that people were dressed in modern clothes.”

That kind of concentration has carried Gallant to the heights of her art. Critics in several countries have ranked her among the modern masters of the short story. And on Oct. 14, the International Authors Festival in Toronto will honor her with a special tribute. Later in the month, she is travelling to Ottawa, where she will be made a Companion of the Order of Canada. Such accolades from her native land have come relatively late in her long career. When the 28-year-old Gallant moved from Montreal to Paris in 1950, it was an American magazine, The New Yorker, that bought her stories and made it possible for her to earn a living over the next four decades. “The United States was my career,” she said with a certain sharpness. “Canada paid no attention to me until 1979.” That was the year her collection From the Fifteenth District finally introduced her to a broad range of Canadian readers. Two years later, a book of her specifically Canadian stories, Home Truths, won the Governor General's Award.

Gallant's work is particularly good at evoking the hopes and despair of characters who feel displaced or abandoned. Those themes may well have their roots in her own bleak early life. When Mavis Young was 10, her father died and her mother (“She should not have had children,” Gallant once said) shipped her off to a series of boarding schools in Canada and the United States. Then, in her 20s Gallant became a features reporter for the weekly Montreal Standard. When she left her job and her brief marriage to pianist John Gallant to write fiction in Europe, she was ridiculed by many of her friends and colleagues. “People thought I was nuts,” she recalled.

For more than 40 years, Gallant—she never remarried—has lived in Paris. Fluent in French, she often writes with uncanny perceptiveness about the French middle class. The skilful and moving title story of her new collection concerns a young Parisian woman, Sylvie, who refuses to marry the young man, Arnaud, whom her parents have chosen for her. (The tale is set in the 1950s, when family social codes were still very strict.) In the end, Arnaud and Sylvie come to a surprising understanding, and the way Gallant achieves this unexpected result is a demonstration of her great fictional subtlety. At first, the story seems like a depiction of the way a decorous middle class squeezes its young into conformity. Yet almost miraculously, happiness arises out of the repressive situation, like a wildflower thrusting up through a crack in the pavement. “It is a story that men like and that irritates women,” Gallant remarked. “They complain that Sylvie is so passive. But of course it was the times.”

Two other stories in Across the Bridge also pit the freshness of youth against the compromised dullness of an older generation. In “Dede,” Gallant describes a bourgeois garden party in Paris. The atmosphere is one of stifling blandness—until one electric moment when a young man acts decisively to save the guests from a horde of wasps that has descended on the party food. Yet his obvious potential to grow into a vital, original adult seems doomed by the society around him. Similarly, in “The Fenton Child,” a bright, young, self-possessed French-Canadian woman discovers some of the hypocrisy that governs relations between the francophone and anglophone communities in 1940s Montreal.

There is a deep yet controlled sense of embattlement in those stories that finds a more dramatic counterpoint in Gallant's own personality. She is renowned for her quick temper, and during a Maclean's photo session she showed it. When the camera caught what she took to be an unattractive expression, she whirled on the photographer with startling fierceness. “I'll put a curse on you,” she seethed, her finger pointing, “if you give that picture to your photo editor.” But there was already a twinkle in her eye as the photographer tried to reassure her. And a moment later, Mavis Gallant was once again conversing animatedly, her youthful voice recalling the streets and cities she has turned into fiction.