Dorothy (Frances) Canfield Fisher Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Dorothy (Frances) Canfield Fisher

Dorothea Frances Canfield was born in Lawrence, Kansas, the daughter of Flavia Camp Canfield, an artist, and James Hulme Canfield, a professor of economics at the University of Kansas. She spent much of her childhood in travel. Mrs. Canfield had a studio in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where Dorothy Canfield, at the age of ten, was exposed to both bohemia and French convent schools. She received her Ph.B. from Ohio State University in 1899, studied at the Sorbonne, and then took her Ph.D. in Romance languages from Columbia in 1904, with a dissertation entitled Corneille and Racine in England. When in 1906, a textbook, Elementary Composition, coauthored with George R. Carpenter, was published, she seemed destined for a brilliant academic career. But the year 1907 changed the course of her life: her first novel, Gunhild, was published; she married John Redwood Fisher, former captain of the Columbia football team; and she inherited her great-grandfather's farm in Arlington, Vermont. Although they would travel extensively, the Fishers would always call Arlington home.

A winter in Italy in 1912 led to a friendship with educator Maria Montessori and a trio of books: A Montessori Mother (1912), an adaptation, for the American home, of Dr. Montessori's theories; The Montessori Manual (1913), a more practical guide than its predecessor; and Mothers and Children (1914), a book not strictly about Montessori method, but imbued with the theory, shared by both women, of respect for the child as an individual.

In 1912, the Fishers' first child, Sally, was born, and Dorothy Canfield's second novel, The Squirrel-Cage, was published. (She was to write under the name Dorothy Canfield until 1940.) The Squirrel-Cage is the story of Lydia Emery, a brilliant young woman from a conventional upper-middle-class family, who allows herself to be steered into marriage with Paul Hollister, an ambitious but tiresome businessman, despite the fact that she is in love with Daniel Rankin, a revolutionary, idealistic cabinetmaker. The novel captures the trapped feeling of many married women of the early twentieth century, but it is flawed by an easy solution, a dynamo accident which leaves Lydia a widow. This is the last time Dorothy Canfield would simply get rid of the irksome husband.

Hillsboro People, published in 1915, was her first volume of short stories. Written in collaboration with her friend, the poet Sarah N. Cleghorn, it contains eight poems of Cleghorn's and eighteen of Fisher's stories and sketches of the people of a thinly disguised Arlington, Vermont, a subject which was to prove nearly inexhaustible for her. The Bent Twig of the same year is, like all her novels, autobiographical to some degree. It is a Bildungsroman, chronicling the young life of Sylvia Marshall, the lovely, self-willed, and complex daughter of a university professor. Burdened in her social pursuits by parents who shun wealth and social status for duty, truth, and beauty--that is, who are considered "queer" by her peers--she almost succumbs to the lure of material success before finally realizing that she does in fact share her parents' ideals.

By this time, Fisher was thirty-six and the mother of two (her second child, Jimmy, born in 1914, was to die in World War II) who led a secluded life and wrote novels and short stories on what now appear to be conventional themes. The radicalism of the postwar generation of writers was soon to make her work look conservative, particularly in its treatment of sex. Her fiction deals with family relationships, specifically with the supreme importance of children, and with the responsibilities of the wife and mother. (Even her best work tended to be didactic and consequently wordy, although her short stories suffered least from this fault.) While tolerant of other women's attempts to redefine the feminine role, she retained conventional notions of marriage and motherhood. But Dorothy Canfield Fisher was anything but a conventional person. Like the Marshalls of The Bent Twig, she lived her life according to what are for most of us impossibly high standards of social duty and devotion to ideals, turning her back on success in the form of an academic career few women of her day could ever hope to attain. She was courageous and dynamic, and an espouser of all manner of liberal causes. In the spring of 1916, John Fisher went to France to serve as an ambulance driver. In the autumn, his wife and children followed.

Fisher spent three years in France doing war work. Unlike many other well-meaning Americans, her command of European languages allowed her to do valuable work rehabilitating blinded French soldiers, establishing a children's convalescent home, and running the camp commissary while her husband trained ambulance drivers. And these years produced two volumes of short stories, Home Fires in France (1918) and The Day of Glory (1919), and material for a third, Basque People (1931).

Back in Vermont, Fisher completed a translation of Giovanni Papini's Life of Christ (1923); still another volume of short stories, Raw Material (1923), and a string of novels. The Brimming Cup (1921) examines the theory of individual self-determination in married life. When first engaged, Marise and Neale Crittenden vow to be true to their highest ideals. Some ten years later, they seem to have succeeded--Neale is a pillar of their community, and Marise, still an accomplished pianist, is the happy mother of three--when temptation appears in the form of Vincent Marsh, the selfish and worldly other man. Neale, Canfield's first successful hero, wisely realizes that only Marise herself can decide which path her life will take. Due in a large part to his strength of character, Marise chooses to stay with her family. Rough-Hewn (1922), serving as a preface to its predecessor, traces the separate lives of Marise and Neale from their births to their wedding.

The Home-Maker (1924) and Her Son's Wife (1926) move ahead into less autobiographical themes. The Home-Maker is the story of a nervous, discontented, compulsively neat woman who is ruining the lives of her children and her husband, a dreamer unhappy as a businessman. When her husband is crippled in an accident, they exchange roles: the wife finds fulfillment in the business world; the husband succeeds as a homemaker; and, most importantly for Dorothy Fisher , the children are better off. Her Son's Wife contains what is perhaps Fisher's best piece of character creation. Mary Bascomb, a perfectionist who specializes in ordering other people's lives, is shocked into reexamining her ideals when her idolized son marries and brings to their home a cheap, vulgar girl. After their daughter, Dids, is born, Mary fights for Dids to free her from her mother's influence. By the end of the novel, Dids has grown up to be a fine young woman on her way to the university, and Mary has gained the maturity she needs to be a friend to her son's wife.

The Deepening Stream (1930) returns to semi-autobiographical material in yet another story of a woman's journey to maturity. Bonfire (1933) is the story of a rural Vermont nurse whose brother marries a siren from a nearby mountain settlement and consequently throws the entire village into an uproar. In this novel, the central focus is not on an individual, but on the village as a whole. Seasoned Timber (1939) explores the predicament of the principal of a poor Vermont academy which is offered a million dollars if it will adopt certain undemocratic policies. Liberalism and the Vermont character prevail.

During their years in Arlington, the Fishers lived and wrote in the original farmhouse built by her forebears in 1763. While John Fisher served in the state legislature, Dorothy Fisher kept herself busy with her favorite causes. She worked for the Vermont Children's Aid Society, served on the state board of education (as its first and only woman member), worked for reforestation, wrote and produced plays with local people, served as a trustee of both Bennington College and Howard University, was president of the American Association for Adult Education (and wrote books on that subject), established a community center and library in Arlington, wrote children's books, served for twenty-five years on the Book-of-the-Month Club board of selection (which required her to read fifteen books a month), lectured widely, and learned foreign languages as a pastime. She was named by Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the ten most influential women in the United States. Her last two books, Vermont Tradition (1953) and Memories of Arlington, Vermont (1957), were published when she was in her seventies. She died in Arlington on 9 November 1958.