Writing Politically: Dorothy Canfield and the “Wrongness of the World”

Unlike her friend Willa Cather, novelist Dorothy Canfield addressed a range of public issues including public education, economic and social inequality, denial of career opportunities to women, racial prejudice, and war. Yet the political element in her fiction has not usually been recognized, even when her educational and humanitarian aims have been. In “Writing Politically,” Janis Stout argues that a number of Canfield's novels, including The Bent Twig (1915), The Brimming Cup (1921), The Home-Maker (1924), Her Son's Wife (1926), The Deepening Stream (1930), Bonfire (1933), and Seasoned Timber (1939), can rightly be labeled political fiction.