Dorothea Frances Canfield, or Dorothy Canfield, became an undergraduate in Ohio State University, of which her father (James Hulme Canfield) was president at that time. Her degree of bachelor of philosophy came from Ohio State University. When Mr. Canfield moved to New York to be librarian at Columbia University his daughter took up postgraduate work there, specializing in the Romance languages, and won her degree of doctor of philosophy. For three years, from 1902 to 1905, she was secretary of the Horace Mann School. Her associates all her life have been cosmopolitan in the proper sense of that word. Her mother, Flavia (Camp) Canfield, is an artist of some attainment and with her Dorothy Canfield spent a good deal of her life abroad. The result--one result--was friends of all nationalities living pretty much all over the world. Mrs. Fisher is consequently a person of broad sympathies, but the predominant quality in her seems to be a clear-headed, hearty New England Americanism. At one time or another she has picked up a good knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish. French she acquired as a child tumbling about in the Paris studio of her mother. Now her children are learning their French in Paris.
After their marriage in 1907, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher left New York and went hunting for a working and living place far away from the city. On the side of one of the Green Mountains, near the little village of Arlington, Vermont, they found a fair approximation of what they were after. The old house already on the farm they made over to suit their needs and wishes. A spring branch on the mountain side was boxed up and the water piped down to the house. An electric lighting plant was installed. A study entirely separate from the house was built. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher make no effort to have the farm cultivated. That is, they didn’t in the good--or bad--old days before the war. They were on it to live and work, but not to bury themselves in agricultural details. The nearest approach to tilling the soil was the garden, the re-foresting of the mountain side with baby pine trees, and the rejuvenation of an ancient saw mill to work up the scrub timber.
Arlington is “in no sense a literary rural community.” The village has only a few hundred people in it, is two miles away from the Fisher farm, and its post-office has few manuscripts to handle either way. In 1911-12, for variety, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher went to Rome for the winter. It was there that she made the acquaintance of Madame Montessori. An American publisher was having trouble with the translation of Madame Montessori’s book about her pedagogical system. Knowing that Mrs. Fisher was an excellent Italian scholar and that she was already on the ground, the publisher arranged for her assistance with the translation. Almost every day of that winter Mrs. Fisher was at the Casa di Bambini (Children’s House) looking after the translation and helping to entertain and to explain the Montessori system to commissions sent from England, France and other European countries. The direct result of that winter was Mrs. Fisher’s _A Montessori Mother_, a simplification and adaptation, in her delightfully easy and half-humorous style, of the Italian system to the needs of American mothers. Besides being published in the United States, Canada, England and India this book has been translated into five foreign languages.