Margaret Atwood on Mavis Gallant's "Orphans' Progress"

In 1965, when I was twenty-five and starting out as a writer, I was reading The New Yorker, as all of us young writers did.

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The magazine published short stories and I wrote them, though, at that time, not very many of them and not very well. In the April 3rd issue, I came across a story called “Orphans’ Progress,” by Mavis Gallant, a writer I hadn't heard of. Oddly, it was set in Canada; most of the stories in The New Yorker took place in the United States, and why not? It was an American publication.

In the story, two girls living with a dysfunctional mother in Montreal are taken away from her by well-meaning social workers. The mother is a mess—her husband is dead, she’s become an alcoholic, she’s been sleeping with a series of increasingly awful men, her shoddy abode is exceptionally dirty, her daughters are not bathed, they are not fed healthy food—but the girls love her and she loves them, in her own fashion. Filthy though it was, her home was their nest, and now they have been removed from it. They are sent off to a grandmother in Ontario who is the epitome of cold, self-righteous Protestant virtue. “Whether it is the right thing or the wrong thing as far as the children are concerned, it is the end of love,” the narrator says.