Since 1911 with short stories and a book a year there is nothing to chronicle but a progressive and uninterrupted success. Nothing except the Tired Business Woman. Make no mistake; this creation of Miss Ferber’s is not a feminine counterpart of the Tired Business Man. The T. B. W. does not go to musical shows and sit in the front rows. She does not telephone home to the husband that she is sorry but important business will detain her downtown this evening. She does not bring home old friends unexpectedly to dinner, or worse, not bring them home to dinner. She is man-less but not because she need be. She is unmarried or a widow. She has a boy, like Jock McChesney, and finds the task of making a man of him, in outside hours not devoted to earning their living, a woman-sized job! Give Edna Ferber credit for this, that she has done as much as the cleverest feminist to make the world see the self-reliant woman as she is, and not as the world deduces she may be. A woman, yes, and a mother, yes! But a regular person above everything else. Read, or re-read, Emma McChesney & Co. with this in a corner of your mind and you will be thankful to Miss Ferber when you have finished. Some thanks, too, may go to Ethel Barrymore, whose impersonation of the Tired But Admired (and admirable) Business Woman of Miss Ferber’s fiction reënforced the lesson of the book with the ocular demonstration of the play.
Miss Ferber is going forward. The evidence of it will be found in the stories contained in her latest book, Cheerful—By Request (1918) and perhaps particularly in the story in that volume called The Gay Old Dog. At thirty-one she has her best years—as literary records go—before her. No painstaking appraisal of her work would be wise at this time. In the next two or three years she may overshadow everything she has done so far. We hope so. Because then, bearing in mind that month’s initial difference, we shall have high hopes ourselves!
Books by Edna Ferber
Dawn O’Hara, 1911.
Buttered Side Down, 1912.
Roast Beef Medium, 1913.
Personality Plus, 1914.
Emma McChesney & Co., 1915.
Fanny Herself, 1917.
Cheerful—By Request, 1918.
Half Portions, 1920.
$1200 a Year, 1920.
The Girls, 1921.
Gigolo, 1922.
First six books published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York; the others by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXV
DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
MRS. FISHER is, we think, the only novelist of whose work we shall say nothing. Why? Because it “speaks for itself”? Certainly not. Every one’s work does that. No, because it does not speak sufficiently for her.
You are asked here and now to think of her not as a novelist but as a woman. For as a novelist we could say of her only the obvious fact, that she is a top-notcher judged by any and every standard. The woman who could write The Squirrel-Cage does not need any critical tests applied to determine the worth and genuineness of her work, nor the sincerity of it. What she does need, or rather, what her readers and all readers need, is a reminder of her rôle as teacher, helper, friend. She is one of those fine people whose work makes the plain word “service” a shining and symbolic thing. “Service” is no longer a word but a ritual and a liturgy.
We shall give an outline of her life but as the friend who prepared it for us says in a letter enclosing it: “It does not do justice to her very useful war work.” This letter further says, with simple truth:
“She has been one who has not broken down under the strain but has gone on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running, almost entirely alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle, editing a magazine for them, running the presses, often with her own hands, getting books written for them; all the time looking out for refugees and personal cases that came under her attention; caring for children from the evacuated portions of France, organizing work for them; then she dropped all that and ran the camp on the edge of the war zone where her husband was stationed to train the young ambulance workers; and while there she started any number of important things—reading rooms, etc. Then she went back to her work in Paris. Just now she is at the base of the Pyrenees, organizing a Red Cross hospital for children from the evacuated portions.