I have long been interested in writers who have fallen into neglect. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is, unfortunately, among those whose work is seldom read these days, though she was quite famous in her time. The author of 35 books, some of them bestsellers, many of her stories appearing in Best American Short Stories and O.
Henry anthologies, she was also a noted educational reformer and social activist who was once named among the ten most influential women in the United States by no less than Eleanor Roosevelt.
Few of her books remain in print. It has an unusual and compelling structureβthe main character, Aunt Minnie, tells the same story three different times over a period of decades, and each time she tells the story it transforms in major ways, taking on radically different shadings and meanings, altering details. I love the way Canfield Fisher uses unshowy, conversational language to reveal complex psychological depths.
It was three timesβbut at intervals of many yearsβthat I heard my Aunt Minnie tell about an experience of her girlhood that had made a never-to-be-forgotten impression on her. The first time she was in her thirties, still young. But she had then been married for ten years, so that to my group of friends, all in the early teens, she seemed quite of another generation.
The day she told us the story, we had been idling on one end of her porch as we made casual plans for a picnic supper in the woods. Aunt Minnie laid down her sewing. Her voice had a special quality which, perhaps, young people of today would not recognize. But we did. We knew from experience that it was the dark voice grownups used when they were going to say something about sex. Yet at first what she had to say was like any dull family anecdote; she had been ill when she was fifteen; and afterwards she was run down, thin, with no appetite.
