In 1907, when she was 28, Dorothy Canfield (in fact Dr Canfield since she had received her PhD three years before) married John Redwood Fisher and published her first novel. In the same year, she inherited her great-grandfather’s farm in Arlington, Vermont; the town appears (often with the skimpiest of literary veils) in many of her books. Here is a piece of audio compiled by the Vermont Historical Society  – the voice at the beginning is hers, and then the other speakers are interesting about her loyalty to Vermont and her huge distinction as a writer, as a thinker and as a person.

One of the fascinating things about Dorothy Canfield Fisher is her university career – at the end of the nineteenth century! This photograph in the Ohio State University Yearbook shows her in 1899 when she was 20. (She was born in 1879, six weeks after E M Forster, whom she resembles in so many ways.) Her education was partly due to her father being chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln – here she did post-graduate work.There is an entry from the diary of the WW1 general John J Pershing online here: 'June 21 1917 Breakfasted at the  Crillon [in Paris] with Dorothy Canfield.' He had taught her at Lincoln. And she was then living in France doing war work, a period of her life so beautifully evoked in The Deepening Stream. 

In 1916 Dorothy Canfield Fisher and her husband went to France to help the war effort. John Fisher worked for the ambulance service while Dorothy worked in different aid programmes. She established a home for refugee children, a Braille Press where blind veterans could work, and edited a war magazine for disabled soldiers. The second half of The Deepening Stream describes some aspects of the Fishers' years in wartime France. 

On the Post this week a tribute to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in anticipation of our publication on October 1st of The Deepening Stream. We read this in 2019 and it was definitely the best book we read that year. In fact it's hard to think of a better book that has come into our life since then. Is it as good as The Homemaker? Well yes, but in a different way. So here is the first of five photographs of one of America's greatest writers, none of them the classic picture with which most Persephone readers will be familiar. This is a studio portrait, she was maybe in her early '40s: if it was 1924, the same year as The Homemaker, then she would have been 45.

There seems to be a lot of discussion as to whether to call it a larder or pantry. Hattie Garlick in her piece linked larder with lard and pantry with pans thereby implying that the larder was more for food and the pantry more for utensils. Nowadays the words are virtually interchangeable. We have one in fact in Edgar Buildings – it's a small room between the kitchen (with two ranges) and what we think of as the housekeeper's room because it has a fireplace (it's now the bookmark room). The larder/pantry has just been cleared to make way for a hundred boxes of pamphlets/monographs/booklets published by the late Cecil Woolf, eighty different ones in the Bloomsbury Heritage series, details here, and we shall sell them in the shop. New uses for a pantry!

A 1940s larder at Beamish Museum. We would have had to eat rabbit during the war, indeed be able to skin rabbits, thank heavens we don't have to any more. Cf They Can't Ration These (which advocates eating squirrels!).

A traditional old-fashioned larder in Kent in 1958, photograph in the Museum of the Home. In fact this would have been quite an unusual larder because it had a window - the traditional larder would have had ventilation but no natural light. And apart from a string of onions there doesn't seem to be much fresh food. But it's still a thing of beauty.