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Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, author of The Home-Maker and The Deepening Stream
Dorothea ‘Dorothy’ Canfield Fisher, who was born in 1879, was the daughter of an academic and an artist. Brought up in the Midwest, she went to university in Ohio and in New York. After marrying James Fisher in 1907, she spent the rest of her life in Arlington, Vermont, the home of her pioneering ancestors (apart from 1916-19 in France helping with the war effort); here she lived in a community of writers that included Robert Frost. He remarked that ‘everything that ever happened or occurred to her converged as into a napkin ring and came out wide on the other side of it Vermontly.’ A popular and prolific writer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote 15 novels, 6 short story collections and 18 non-fiction books. Persephone Books publishes The Home-Maker (1924) and The Deepening Stream (1930). She was responsible for bringing the Montessori method to the U.S., named one of the top ten most influential women in America by Eleanor Roosevelt, and sat on the Vermont Board of Education; she was also on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club for 25 years. Her son was killed in the Philippines in 1945, after which she wrote no more fiction; she died in 1958.
