Dorothy Canfield

Biography

Dorothy Canfield (Fisher) exerted an influence upon the literary taste of American readers as one of 5 judges, and the only woman, on the selection board for the popular Book of the Month Club which started in 1926. She was the daughter of artist Flavia Camp and college professor and administrator James Hulme Canfield. Under the tutelage of her rebellious mother who chafed at the midwestern towns where her husband taught, she was exposed to the cultures of Europe with tours of galleries in France, Italy, and Spain.After a course of study at the Sorbonne in 1899, Dorothy completed a PHD in languages at Columbia where her father would eventually relocate as library head.She would become a librarian herself at New York City's Horace Mann School. Marrying John Fisher in 1907 she settled into a more rural scene as a freelance author and farmer in Arlington, Vermont.One of her projects was translating Italian educational writer Maria Montessori into English and promoting the Montessori method for US parents. During WWI she contributed journalism on the conflict.Her concern about the after effects of the war on democratic culture informed her participation in meetings of the Book of the Month program in New York City, where she traveled from Vermont. Her feminist oriented novel The Homemaker was turned into a Hollywood film. She became popular enough among housewives grappling with their modern roles that a Dorothy Canfield club was formed in Connersville, Indiana. Writer Joan Shelley Rubin notes her contribution to what she dubbed The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992).