In Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s novels, children are malleable—in negative ways as well as positive ones—and education is all.
“A Montessori Mother” is “dedicated by permission to Maria Montessori,” whom Canfield Fisher had met in Rome, in 1911, and the book is presented as a response to the battery of questions that the writer had faced since her return: “Now, you’ve been to Rome; you’ve seen the Montessori schools. . . . Is it really so wonderful? Or is it just a fad? Is it true that the children are allowed to do exactly as they please? I should think it would spoil them beyond endurance.
It is possible that what stirred inside her head at that moment was her brain, waking up. She was nine years old, and she was in the third A grade at school, but that was the first time she had ever had a whole thought of her very own. At home, Aunt Frances had always known exactly what she was doing, and had helped her over the hard places before she even knew they were there; and at school her teachers had been carefully trained to think faster than the scholars.
And then comes an entirely unexpected plot twist: Matey and Adrian get on a ship with their two very young children to make the dangerous crossing to France. Adrian does hesitate to bring the children, but Matey is insistent. “I learned when I was a little girl thatis better than letting a barrier grow up between parents and children,” she says, and her father-in-law, a profoundly moral Quaker, approves: “It will be a sorry day . . .
Canfield Fisher wrote about topics and experiences that don’t regularly turn up in fiction, and not only the decision to take her young children into a war. Her focus on children’s inner lives, and on the intensity and sometimes ferocity of family life, was distinctly her own.
Canfield Fisher and what remains of her legacy have come under attack in recent years. She has been accused of connections to the, which has an ugly history in Vermont, as in many other states. Canfield Fisher worked with an organization, the Vermont Commission on Country Life, which had ties to the Eugenics Survey of Vermont—Canfield Fisher served on the Committee for the Preservation of Vermont Literature and Ideals.
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