Prior Park is virtually in Bath – you walk south from the station and up to Widcombe and along beautiful Church Street and there it is, details here. There is a tea stall!

This week on the Post: National Trust gardens within striking distance of Bath. We are thinking of far away Persephone readers who might be fantasising about one day, maybe later this year, maybe next, who knows, coming to see us in Bath as part of a holiday in Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. Normality might return soon... This is Dyrham Park, seven miles from Bath, more details here.

And finally the photograph that is reprinted inside The Home-Maker. For any readers of the Post who have not read this marvellous book – we urge them to straightaway.

It is Bloomsday, the day we were going to have an event discussing why Ulysses is seen as a great classic and eg. The Deepening Stream (similar in length if nothing else) isn't. The event has been cancelled (one of the Persephone girls has Covid) but the question remains. Dorothy Canfield Fisher had two children. The photograph shows her son James Fisher, who was a surgeon and captain in the U.S. Army. In January 1945 he was killed during the raid at Cabanatuan carried out to rescue American POWs. The effect of his death on his mother was incalculable.

The Home-Maker is in some ways DCF's most profound novel as it says so much about marriage and life with children. And life. This is why she is a great novelist. Forget works of art (Woolf, and some would say Cather, or Joyce - tomorrow is Bloomsday) concentrate on novels which SPEAK TO US. Which TELL US THINGS. Which help us to lead better lives. It is this last quality for which we value DCF so hugely. She is heir to Forster in her moral vision (funnily enough The Home-Maker was published the same year as A Passage to India. What a year!).

One of the reasons for Dorothy Canfield Fisher's greatness is her range. She was a phenomenal person - kind, wise, hard-working - but her interests ranged from the Montessori method to excellence in literature (hence her involvement with the Book of the Month Club for years) and countless important issues in-between. No wonder Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the ten most influential women in America. And all this combined with being a great novelist. Of course many people are daunted by the length of The Deepening Stream, her favourite among her novels. But the fact is anyone who reads it is stunned. Certainly, here at Persephone Books, we have not read a better novel since our first reading of it three years ago. And proof-reading the re-set version was almost awe-inspiring. Here she is at much the same age as in yesterday's picture but less tired-looking. One can imagine this is how she would have looked in France from 1916-9.

This week on the Post we focus on one of America's greatest novelists – but is she recognised as such? Certainly not. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is, in our view, a better novelist than Willa Cather or even Edith Wharton. This is from The Home-Maker (a century old in 2024, and it has barely aged; we have had it in print for twenty-three years):  'How he loathed his life-long slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse. “It’s the clock that is the nay-sayer to life,” he thought.'