“All this is reflected, or I should say the result of her experiences is reflected in her _Home Fires in France_, just published this fall. It is just what the title says, and I don’t know anything that has been written anything like it. There isn’t any bursting shrapnel in it, no heroics or medals of honor; it is merely full of the French women and some Americans who have done the steady, quiet work of holding life together until the war should be over. Steadily they try to reconstruct what the Germans have destroyed.... It is the best thing she has done.”
It and the deeds back of it. When you read _Home Fires in France_ you will understand why one man who read proof on it exclaimed:
“If every one knew this book as I know it there would be no doubt of it selling 100,000 copies at once.”
With _The Squirrel-Cage_, published in 1912, Mrs. Fisher became a novelist. It was followed by two books on child training, _A Montessori Mother_ (1913) and _Mothers and Children_ (1914), and then the teacher resumed the rôle of storyteller with _The Bent Twig_. Before _The Squirrel-Cage_ Mrs. Fisher was merely the author of a few textbooks. After it she was an important figure in American fiction.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher is thirty-eight years old, a bachelor of philosophy and a doctor of philosophy, mistress of six languages, author of twelve books, mother of two children. She and her husband, John Redwood Fisher, captain of a Columbia football team, himself a critic and writer, divided their time before the war between a farm near a little Vermont village and occasional excursions to New York, Rome or some other metropolis. In 1915, Mr. Fisher joined the ambulance service and went to France. Mrs. Fisher was at work on _Understood Betsy_, but as soon as that was finished she followed her husband to Paris with her children. Since then she has been absorbed in war relief work which has ranged from running an establishment that prints books for soldiers blinded in battle to managing five peasant women cooks and buying supplies for a large training camp for ambulance drivers. Mr. Fisher is now a first lieutenant in the United States Army in France.
Mrs. Fisher was born in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was president of the University of Kansas. As a high school girl in Lawrence she made friends with an army officer on the staff of a nearby war college. He taught her to ride horseback and introduced her to his hobby, higher mathematics. This friendship has lately been resumed in France. The young army officer is now General John J. Pershing.