SOURCE: "Dorothy Canfield: A Neglected Best Seller," in The Bookman, New York, Vol. LXXIV, No. 1, September, 1931, pp. 40-4.

In the following essay, Wyckoff examines Fisher's novels and argues against the common view of her as only a popular novelist.

Dorothy Canfield has been a famous novelist for a good many years now. One has to be in one's forties to remember the excitement with which we followed The Squirrel Cage as it came out in Everybody's Magazine in 1911. And every year or so since that time, something interesting has appeared over her signature. It might be a long and absorbing novel, such as The Bent Twig or Rough-Hewn. It might be a juvenile in Saint Nicholas, called Understood Betsy, so wise and so humorous that sophisticated mothers and spoiled little girls read it with the same pleased shame; it might be a book about the Montessori method, or...