(Like most happy childhoods, Sylvia's early years lay back...)
Like most happy childhoods, Sylvia's early years lay back of her in a long, cheerful procession of featureless days, the outlines of which were blurred into one shimmering glow by the very radiance of their sunshine. Here and there she remembered patches, sensations, pictures, scents. But from her seventh birthday her memories began to have perspective, continuity. She remembered an occasional whole scene, a whole afternoon, just as it happened.
(In her Self-Reliance Mrs. Fisher has traced in a concrete...)
In her Self-Reliance Mrs. Fisher has traced in a concrete and interesting way the changes in our social organization and activities which have taken place recently, which are continuing actively at the present moment, and which have already profoundly affected home and school life.
(Understood Betsy tells of Elizabeth Ann, a 9-year-old orp...)
Understood Betsy tells of Elizabeth Ann, a 9-year-old orphan who goes from a sheltered existence with relatives in the city, to living on a Vermont farm, the Putneys, whose child-rearing practices had always seemed suspect to Harriet and her daughter.
(Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the...)
Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby, bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories jostling him where he stood. Without troubling to look at his watch, he informed the two young foreigners that they had a long hour to wait before the cable-railway would send a car down to the Campagna. His lazy nonchalance was faintly colored with the satisfaction, common to his profession, in the discomfiture of travelers. Their look upon him was of amazed gratitude. Evidently they did not understand Italian, he thought, and repeated his information more slowly, with an unrecognizable word or two of badly pronounced English thrown in. He felt slightly vexed that he could not make them feel the proper annoyance, and added, "It may even be so late that the signori would miss the connection for the last tramway car back to Rome. It is a long walk back to the city across the Campagna."
(In the spring of 1893 Strindberg had just published A Foo...)
In the spring of 1893 Strindberg had just published A Fool s Confession D Annunzio was employing all the multicolored glory of his style to prove The Triumph of Death Hardy was somberly mixing on his palette the twilight grays and blacks and mourning purples of Jude the Obscure Nordau gnashing his teeth was bellowing Decadent at his contemporaries who smirked a complacent acceptance of the epithet and all unconscious of the futility and sordidness of the world Neale Crittenden swaggered along Central Avenue brandishing his shinny stick
Dorothy Canfield Fisher was an American author and social activist. Her books popularized Vermont as a rural kingdom of rugged hill farms tilled by self-reliant, sturdy people, while her articles and columns were about politics, prison reform, domestic life and the need for better education funding.
Background
Dorothea Frances Canfield Fisher was born on February 17, 1879 in Lawrence, Kansas, United States; the daughter of James Hulme Canfield, a professor at the University of Kansas, and Flavia A. Camp, a schoolteacher. Her mother took her to Paris in 1890, and thereby awakened her interest in French culture. The family feared that James Canfield's outspoken endorsement of free trade and women's rights would cost him his job.
Hence Fisher cherished the security of bucolic Arlington, Vermont, where she spent many childhood summers with older relatives. She described the tensions of academic life in The Bent Twig (1915), and her Vermont vacations were fictionalized in the juvenile work Understood Betsy (1917), probably her best-selling story.
Education
Dorothy, as she called herself when she entered the University of Nebraska in 1894, intended to pursue a musical career; but deafness forced her to turn to literature. She transferred in 1895 to Ohio State University, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1899. After a year at the Sorbonne and four years in New York, she earned the first Ph.D. in Romance languages awarded by Columbia University to a woman. Her dissertation was published as Corneille and Racine in England (1904). Her first magazine story had appeared the year before.
Fisher was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Dartmouth College and received others from the University of Nebraska, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Smith, Williams, Ohio State University, and the University of Vermont.
After teaching for a year at the Horace Mann School in New York City, she decided to concentrate on writing, and found it brought her a comfortable living. In 1911-1912 Fisher worked for five months with Maria Montessori in Rome, an experience that resulted in four books on child development (1912 - 1916) that were drawn also from her experience with her two children.
Education remained her primary interest, expressed in her writing and in her service on the Vermont State Board of Education (1921 - 1923) and on the American Youth Commission (1935 - 1941).
Her husband volunteered for ambulance service in April 1916, and in August the family moved to Paris, where she organized the printing of books in braille for blinded soldiers, ran the commissary for her husband's training camp, and during the last year of the war ran a home for refugee children at Guéthary. Writing in brief bursts, she completed two volumes of stories about wartime France.
Fisher returned from the war profoundly depressed, but rebounded through intense work and produced her best, most popular writing in the 1920's. The Brimming Cup (1921) was a best-seller. Fisher's translation of Giovanni Papini's Life of Christ (1923) sold 350,000 copies. Movie rights were sold for The Home-Maker (1924). Her Son's Wife (1926), which was serialized, reflected her early reading of Freud. The Deepening Stream (1930), which expressed her feelings about World War I and family life, sold more than 150,000 copies during its first three years.
Fisher was also a member of the selection committee for the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926 - 1950), in which capacity she read some 150 books a year. Gradually Fisher's output shifted toward nonfiction. She was elected president of the Adult Education Association in 1934. Her interest in the aims of the association, especially for women, was expressed in Why Stop Learning? (1927) and Learn or Perish (1930).
Fisher's last novel, Seasoned Timber (1939), expressed her faith in education and in the ultimate triumph of freedom over fascism. Her personal war contribution was to assist refugees. In 1940 she organized the Children's Crusade for Children, which raised $130,000 in pennies. Vermont Tradition (1953), Fisher's last major work, skillfully used local lore to illustrate her outlook on life. She continued dictating craftsmanlike copy almost until her death in Arlington, Vermont.
Dorothy Fisher was an anti-imperialist and an antimilitarist, yet she fervently wanted the United States to join the Allies in 1914.
Views
In her lifelong fight for social justice, Fisher stood up for vulnerable minorities: illiterate adults, female prisoners, disabled children, conscientious objectors. She strongly supported women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong education.
Quotations:
"A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary."
"It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest."
"What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live."
"Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell."
"No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve."
"...there are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel."
"Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living."
"If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days."
"Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself."
"Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored."
"The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye."
Personality
Canfield Fisher spoke five languages fluently, including French, Italian and Spanish.
Connections
On May 9, 1907, Fisher married John Redwood Fisher. Her husband dropped out of law school to do editorial work when they married, and agreed to settle in Arlington, Vermont, where her family owned farms and timberland. He also accepted the obscure role of consultant and first reader to his wife. The Fishers had two children, a daughter, Sarah, and a son, James. James was killed in the Philippines in 1945.