Her Son's Wife

In this centenary edition of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's riveting 1926 novel, the widowed Mrs Bascomb finds herself mother-in-law to the very last person she would have chosen for her only son: a shoe-shop assistant named Lottie. 

The theme of Her Son's Wife is Mrs Bascomb's slow acceptance of her own controlling nature, of her own failure to connect. Acceptance, and love for her grandchild, do lead to change, but of a quietly horrifying nature. As Canfield Fisher wrote to her agent: ‘The story turns on the development and strengthening of a character, in this case after 45, the age when most people are set for life. A woman of 45 meets calamity and struggles through great sorrow and misery, to an immensely deeper understanding and self-abnegation.’ But her deceit and conniving raise ethical questions which the reader has to wrestle with. Her Son’s Wife is a novel which involves the reader from the first line to the last.

The leitmotif is shoes. Lottie’s father had been nightwatchman in a shoe factory, she met Ralph Bascomb in a shoe shop. However, her fashionable, and eventually painful, shoes become a trap and subtly deprive her of agency: with echoes of Jane Eyre and The Yellow Wallpaper, the pain they cause confines her to the house. But ‘for heaven’s sakes! If a person isn’t going to be allowed to pick out her own shoes, what next? Somebody’ll be cutting up my food for me, I suppose.’ 

One contemporary writer commented about Her Son's Wife, ‘It is her masterpiece and it is also a masterpiece. It is a profound, subtle analysis of human character and human life and a very remarkable book. I predict that it will win the Pulitzer Prize for 1926. It deserves it.’ (Alas, it was won by Sinclair Lewis.) 

Her Son's Wife is the third novel by Canfield Fisher published by Persephone Books, following PB no. 7 The Home-Maker (1924) and PB no. 141 The Deepening Stream (1930). This is because we believe her to be America’s greatest woman novelist, greater than Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton or Willa Cather or any modern writer. The reason for this, and for her neglect, are one and the same: she was a chronicler of domestic life, of women’s everyday lives, of what Persephone calls ‘domestic feminism’. Her novels are on quiet themes, about quiet ‘ordinary’ people, leading quiet everyday lives in (mostly) small town America. This is not usually the stuff of fiction, which is about the marriage imperative (Jane Austen), the social fabric (George Eliot), the inner life (Proust), ‘only connect’ (Forster) and so on. But it is the stuff of life. 

Endpapers

The endpapers for Her Son's Wife are taken from a 1927 dress fabric called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that was designed by Ralph Barton for the Stehli Silks Corporation and printed on silk crêpe de chine. It was part of ‘Americana’, a range of dress fabrics that Stehli Silks commissioned from leading artists following the Paris Exhibition of decorative arts in 1925, which had an enormous impact when it toured the USA the following year, encouraging American designers to move away from floral patterns and towards designs that depicted contemporary American life in a more modern way. 

Picture Caption

'Attic Memories' by Norman Rockwell, 1925.