The Squirrel-Cage

Set in the fictional town of Endbury, Ohio, this 1912 novel follows Lydia Emery, the youngest daughter of an ambitious middle-class family, who returns from a year abroad ready for her first season in society. Dorothy Canfield Fisher traces Lydia’s slow entanglement in the town’s rituals of courtship and status, and the pull between Paul Hollister, a rising sales manager who offers a respectable match, and Daniel Rankin, who has left an insurance career to build furniture and live plainly in the Black Rock woods. Beneath the domestic surface runs a sharp argument about how business and social ambition press on marriage, and on the lives of women in particular. It ranks among Fisher’s keenest early studies of American middle-class life and the quiet cost of conformity.