The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

“All this is reflected, or I should say the result of her experiences is reflected in her Home Fires in France, just published this fall. It is just what the title says, and I don’t know anything that has been written anything like it. There isn’t any bursting shrapnel in it, no heroics or medals of honor; it is merely full of the French women and some Americans who have done the steady, quiet work of holding life together until the war should be over. Steadily they try to reconstruct what the Germans have destroyed.... It is the best thing she has done.”

It and the deeds back of it. When you read Home Fires in France you will understand why one man who read proof on it exclaimed:

“If every one knew this book as I know it there would be no doubt of it selling 100,000 copies at once.”

With The Squirrel-Cage, published in 1912, Mrs. Fisher became a novelist. It was followed by two books on child training, A Montessori Mother (1913) and Mothers and Children (1914), and then the teacher resumed the rôle of storyteller with The Bent Twig. Before The Squirrel-Cage Mrs. Fisher was merely the author of a few textbooks. After it she was an important figure in American fiction.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher is thirty-eight years old, a bachelor of philosophy and a doctor of philosophy, mistress of six languages, author of twelve books, mother of two children. She and her husband, John Redwood Fisher, captain of a Columbia football team, himself a critic and writer, divided their time before the war between a farm near a little Vermont village and occasional excursions to New York, Rome or some other metropolis. In 1915, Mr. Fisher joined the ambulance service and went to France. Mrs. Fisher was at work on Understood Betsy, but as soon as that was finished she followed her husband to Paris with her children. Since then she has been absorbed in war relief work which has ranged from running an establishment that prints books for soldiers blinded in battle to managing five peasant women cooks and buying supplies for a large training camp for ambulance drivers. Mr. Fisher is now a first lieutenant in the United States Army in France.

Mrs. Fisher was born in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was president of the University of Kansas. As a high school girl in Lawrence she made friends with an army officer on the staff of a nearby war college. He taught her to ride horseback and introduced her to his hobby, higher mathematics. This friendship has lately been resumed in France. The young army officer is now General John J. Pershing.

Dorothea Frances Canfield, or Dorothy Canfield, became an undergraduate in Ohio State University, of which her father (James Hulme Canfield) was president at that time. Her degree of bachelor of philosophy came from Ohio State University. When Mr. Canfield moved to New York to be librarian at Columbia University his daughter took up postgraduate work there, specializing in the Romance languages, and won her degree of doctor of philosophy. For three years, from 1902 to 1905, she was secretary of the Horace Mann School. Her associates all her life have been cosmopolitan in the proper sense of that word. Her mother, Flavia (Camp) Canfield, is an artist of some attainment and with her Dorothy Canfield spent a good deal of her life abroad. The result—one result—was friends of all nationalities living pretty much all over the world. Mrs. Fisher is consequently a person of broad sympathies, but the predominant quality in her seems to be a clear-headed, hearty New England Americanism. At one time or another she has picked up a good knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish. French she acquired as a child tumbling about in the Paris studio of her mother. Now her children are learning their French in Paris.

After their marriage in 1907, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher left New York and went hunting for a working and living place far away from the city. On the side of one of the Green Mountains, near the little village of Arlington, Vermont, they found a fair approximation of what they were after. The old house already on the farm they made over to suit their needs and wishes. A spring branch on the mountain side was boxed up and the water piped down to the house. An electric lighting plant was installed. A study entirely separate from the house was built. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher make no effort to have the farm cultivated. That is, they didn’t in the good—or bad—old days before the war. They were on it to live and work, but not to bury themselves in agricultural details. The nearest approach to tilling the soil was the garden, the re-foresting of the mountain side with baby pine trees, and the rejuvenation of an ancient saw mill to work up the scrub timber.

Arlington is “in no sense a literary rural community.” The village has only a few hundred people in it, is two miles away from the Fisher farm, and its post-office has few manuscripts to handle either way. In 1911-12, for variety, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher went to Rome for the winter. It was there that she made the acquaintance of Madame Montessori. An American publisher was having trouble with the translation of Madame Montessori’s book about her pedagogical system. Knowing that Mrs. Fisher was an excellent Italian scholar and that she was already on the ground, the publisher arranged for her assistance with the translation. Almost every day of that winter Mrs. Fisher was at the Casa di Bambini (Children’s House) looking after the translation and helping to entertain and to explain the Montessori system to commissions sent from England, France and other European countries. The direct result of that winter was Mrs. Fisher’s A Montessori Mother, a simplification and adaptation, in her delightfully easy and half-humorous style, of the Italian system to the needs of American mothers. Besides being published in the United States, Canada, England and India this book has been translated into five foreign languages.

Mrs. Fisher is now one of five members of the State School Board for Vermont, the first woman to be on the State Board of Education in Vermont. This is in line with her ablest work, which has been in training children and adolescents.