Source: The Conversation – UK
UK publisher Persephone Books are continuing to reintroduce “lost” 20th century novels by women to the 21st century, featuring what they term “domestic feminism”.
Coined by Persephone founder Nicola Beauman, domestic feminism acknowledges how significant the home is to human life while rejecting the assumption that it “justified a woman’s whole existence”.
In her 1983 book A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39, Beauman wrote about how these novels often chronicle “the drama of the undramatic” and “the steadfast dailiness of a life that brings its own rewards”. Persephone’s latest publication is no exception.
Her Son’s Wife by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1926; republished 2026) tells the story of Mrs Mary Bascomb, a hardworking widow whose life is turned upside down when her son, Ralph, unexpectedly returns home from college with a new wife, Lottie. As the young couple move into Mary’s home and take over the careful domestic sphere she has kept clean and ordered for years, she struggles to defend her space from the changes.
Canfield Fisher was a bestselling and well reviewed American author in the first half of the 20th century. In fact, Her Son’s Wife was tipped to win the Pulitzer prize when it was first published in 1926.
Today, she is no longer a household name and her novels are mostly out of print. In recent years, however, the work of a few publishers has seen some of her books resurfaced. Persephone, for instance, has also re-published her novels The Home-Maker (1924; republished 1999) and The Deepening Stream (1930; republished 2021).
Canfield Fisher lived a full and busy life supporting social reform and education causes alongside writing numerous books. She influenced her contemporary literary scene both through personal relationships with well-known authors, including Willa Cather and Robert Frost, and serving on the selection committee for the Book of the Month Club for 25 years. A book subscription service with a million members by 1950, Canfield Fisher was the only woman on the selection committee at its founding in 1926 where she helped decide what to recommend to the American reading public.
In that same year, Her Son’s Wife was published by Harcourt and Brace publishers and serialised in the American magazine Woman’s Home Companion. Canfield Fisher wrote the majority of this book between 1924 and 1925 at the age of 45, the same age as the novel’s protagonist. She described the plot as revolving around the moment “a woman of 45 meets calamity”, an age when, it is assumed, “most people are set for life”.
Writing Her Son’s Wife was so emotionally draining for Canfield Fisher that she often feared she wouldn’t be able to finish it.
In one letter to her publisher, she described the experience as akin to a terrifying “hallucination”.
These intense emotions are communicated to readers in evocative passages, such as when Mary represses her deep grief for her husband by focusing on everyday housekeeping tasks:
…she was terrified by it as a timid swimmer is panic-struck to feel deep water under him. To what, away from her traditional moorings, would it sweep her, if she let it have its way with her? By long practice she had learnt how to escape from it, filling her mind and hands with little material processes.
There are also moments when Canfield Fisher connects our everyday world with something more profound. Early on in Her Son’s Wife, Mary goes to check her mailbox and steps out “from the box-like walls of her house into infinity. Over her head the sky rose, boundless and black”. A few lines later, the scene is rendered as simply “a dark night in April”, but the mystical and unnerving glimpse of infinite blackness remains.
In my own research into the influence of religion, Quaker silence, and spiritualism on Canfield Fisher’s writing, scenes like these are examples of how she wrote novels about domestic daily life to dive into the profound experiences of human existence. While hesitant to call herself a Quaker outright, Canfield Fisher married into a Quaker family in 1907, became a member of an informal Quaker Meeting in Vermont by 1949, and felt deeply drawn towards the spiritual silence of Quaker Meetings for Worship.
Despite the sympathy readers may feel for grief-stricken Mary, she can be a rather self-righteous character. Watching her new daughter-in-law, Lottie, through Mary’s eyes we may share her frustration at the mess the house is left in; at Lottie’s obsession with looks over substance; and at her dismissal of Mary in all that she has given her (including a house to live in). But we also wonder at the life Lottie has come from to be where she is now, sobbing out the lines:
It’s too mean. I don’t want anything bad. I just want to have things nice, the way anybody does. And you jump on me for it.
In Her Son’s Wife, Canfield Fisher charts the emotional complexities of her characters with her accomplished, skilled approach that allows us to simultaneously sympathise and get frustrated with Mary, Lottie, and Ralph.
In its deft handling of the nuances of family relationships, mental health, and domestic challenges, the novel speaks to our world today even as it captures a distinct moment in time set one hundred years ago. It is a Persephone novel of the highest calibre, and I am excited to see how readers respond to this latest resurfacing of a neglected Canfield Fisher classic.
Katie Harling-Lee receives funding from the British Academy for a postdoctoral fellowship project researching Quaker silence in the novels of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She has previously worked with Persephone Books to speak about Canfield Fisher’s novel The Deepening Stream at the 2024 Persephone Festival.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/14/her-sons-wife-by-dorothy-canfield-fisher-finds-profound-meaning-and-emotion-in-domestic-life/