SOURCE: "Dorothy Canfield (Dorothy Canfield Fisher)," in The Women Who Make Our Novels, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1928, pp. 61-74.

In the following essay, Overton discusses Fisher's life and her major novels, concluding that Her Son's Wife is Fisher's finest work up to that time.

Very fortunately for her work as a novelist, Dorothy Canfield has been able to find direct outlets for a good deal of her passion as an educator. Thus, although her fiction does not escape didactic moods, it remains fiction. Nor is it autobiographical fiction, as some readers of The Brimming Cup seem to imagine; while her use of backgrounds and incidents from her own life is easily recognized by all readers familiar with her story.

That story is one of hard work, almost without respites, but the results she can point to depend partly on her scholarly gifts. She has been called "a woman of...