The Deepening Stream, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Review by Kate Macdonald

Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s 1930 novel will soon be available in a new edition from Persephone Books, and has a particular interest for Friends. Fisher was not, so far as I can make out, a Quaker herself, but her vigorous involvement in pacifism, war relief in the first world war, child education (she introduced the Montessori method to the US) and feminism are adjacent to Quaker concerns.

The Deepening Stream combines these interests in a thick four-part novel, based around two phases in the protagonist’s life. Matey Gilbert grows up in a sniping academic family, living in various parts of the USA, as her father moves from one French professorship to another, hauling his family with him. Matey’s elder sister Priscilla learns to endure the intolerable passive-aggressive atmosphere created by their duelling parents by flinging herself into constant busyness. Matey takes refuge first in music, which she falls headlong into during a year spent living in Paris with a French family, and then by adopting a lonely dog whose owner has died. Never have a young girl and a dog needed each other more.

In the second half of the book, Matey comes to Rustdorf, a small Quaker town near New York, populated largely by her mother’s family. Matey learns that she has inherited some money unexpectedly from her great-aunt Connie’s estate, but more importantly she falls in love with her distant cousin Adrian. Adrian and his father bring Matey into a Quaker family, and the remainder of the novel shows how Quaker living and values help to repair the psychological damage inflicted by the Gilbert parents on their daughters. Most of Rustdorf’s Quaker inhabitants are distantly related to Matey through her mother. Quaker daily practices suffuse Matey’s new life, and she embraces Quaker beliefs and how Quakers live in the world. She and Adrian take their young family to France during the first world war – he to serve in an ambulance unit, and she to work in war relief and do what she can to support her French foster family.

Fisher was a serious and committed novelist, and worked assiduously in many fields to improve the lives of working people in the US. Eleanor Roosevelt named her as one of the ten most influential women in America. Fisher is also an accomplished storyteller, and The Deepening Stream is absorbing and compelling. It is a long read, but Fisher’s child-centred vision of family life is refreshing. The Quaker component of the novel is central to its themes, and will fascinate those interested in Quaker history from the north-east US. It will also, I hope, add to the bookshelves of readers engaged in collecting Quakers in fiction.

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