SOURCE: "Willa Cather's Commentary on Three Novels by Dorothy Canfield Fisher," in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, Vol. 3, No. 1, January, 1990, pp. 13-15.

In the following essay, Madigan considers Willa Cather's exhortation to prose writers that they simplify their style in relation to her estimate of Fisher's novels Rough-Hewn, The Deepening Stream, and Seasoned Timber.

In her 1922 essay "The Novel Demeublé," which was first published in the New Republic and later collected in Not Under Forty, Willa Cather claimed that the novel had been, for a long while, "overfurnished" (43). She argued in that essay for a clearing away of unnecessary novelistic "furniture," for an uncluttered prose style: "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard...