DOROTHY CANFIELD
Dorothy Canfield grew up in an atmosphere of books and learning. Her father, James H. Canfield, was president of Kansas University, at Lawrence, and there Dorothy was born, Feb. 17, 1879. She attended the high school at Lawrence, and became friends with a young army officer who was teaching at the near-by Army post, and who taught her to ride horseback. In 1917 when the first American troops entered Paris, Dorothy Canfield, who had gone to Paris to help in war work, again met this army officer, General John J. Pershing.
But this is getting ahead of the story. Dr. Canfield was called from Kansas to become president of Ohio State University, and later to be librarian at Columbia University, and so it happened that Dorothy took her college course at Ohio State and her graduate work at Columbia. She specialized in Romance languages, and took her degree as Doctor of Philosophy in 1904. In connection with Professor Carpenter of Columbia she wrote a text book on rhetoric. But books did not absorb quite all of her time, for the next item in her biography is her marriage to John R. Fisher, who had been the captain of the Columbia football team. They made their home at Arlington, Vermont, with frequent visits to Europe. In 1911-1912 they spent the winter in Rome. Here they came to know Madame Montessori, famous for developing a new system of training children. Dorothy Canfield spent many days at the "House of Childhood," studying the methods of this gifted teacher. The result of this was a book, A Montessori Mother, in which the system was adapted to the needs of American children.
The Squirrel Cage, published in 1912, was a study of an unhappy marriage. The book was favorably received by the critics, but found only a moderately wide public. A second novel, The Bent Twig, had college life as its setting; the chief character was the daughter of a professor in a Middle Western university. Meantime she had been publishing in magazines a number of short stories dealing with various types of New England country people, and in 1916 these were gathered into a volume with the title Hillsboro People. This book met with a wide acceptance, not only in this country but in France, where, like her other books, it was quickly translated and published. "Flint and Fire" is taken from this book. The Real Motive, another book of short stories, and Understood Betsy, a book for younger readers, were her next publications.
Meantime the Great War had come, and its summons was heard in their quiet mountain home. Mr. Fisher went to France with the Ambulance Corps; his wife as a war-relief worker. A letter from a friend thus described her work:
She 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, and establishing a Red Cross hospital for them.
Out of the fullness of these experiences she wrote her next book, Home Fires in France, which at once took rank as one of the most notable pieces of literature inspired by the war. It is in the form of short stories, but only the form is fiction: it is a perfectly truthful portrayal of the French women and of some Americans who, far back of the trenches, kept up the life of a nation when all its people were gone. It reveals the soul of the French people. The Day of Glory, her latest book, is a series of further impressions of the war in France.
It is not often that an author takes us into his workshop and lets us see just how his stories are written. The preceding account of Dorothy Canfield's literary methods was written especially for this book.