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.
“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.
BOOKS BY DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
_Corneille and Racine in England_, 1904.
_English Rhetoric and Composition (with Professor
G. R. Carpenter)_, 1906.
_What Shall We Do Now?_ 1906.
_Gunhild_, 1907.
_The Squirrel-Cage_, 1912.
_A Montessori Mother_, 1913.
_Mothers and Children_, 1914.
_The Bent Twig_, 1915.
_Hillsboro People_, 1916.
_The Real Motive_, 1917.
_Understood Betsy_, 1917.
_Home Fires in France_, 1918.
_The Day of Glory_, 1919.
_The Brimming Cup_, 1921.
_Rough-Hewn_, 1922.
_First thirteen published by Henry Holt & Company, New York; others by
Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York._