SOURCE: "Two New England Regionalists," in College English, Vol. 1, No. 4, January, 1940, pp. 291-99.

In the following excerpt, Boynton looks at Fisher's novels set in Vermont and finds Bonfire to be her finest story of the New England region.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, invincible Vermonter, has had a drought to record . . . Vermont crumbles but is not wrecked. In all her stories Vermont character is asserting itself more or less vainly to oppose irresistible forces. The success of the resistance is never included in the stories, but it is usually implied at the end as the obvious theme of an unwritten sequel. Slow crumbling is too vague to submit to chronicle treatment; it needs reinforcement by plot structure, and Mrs. Fisher has her constant factors for this plot: a native Vermonter who has strayed from home and has been distracted by wealth and dazzled by European sophistication preserves his integrity by...