Et si les rôles traditionnels au sein du foyer n’étaient pas la clé du bonheur familial ? L’art de créer un foyer de Dorothy Canfield Fisher bouleverse les conventions en racontant l’histoire de la famille Knapp, où un accident va tout changer.

''The Deepening Stream,'' published in 1930, is a semi-autobiographical novel by Dorothy Canfield Fisher widely regarded as her masterpiece and a significant, though often overlooked, work of World War I literature. The story follows the life of Penelope "Matey" Gilbert from her childhood into adulthood. Matey grows up in a household overshadowed by her parents' subtle but constant emotional conflict. Her family frequently moves between American academic towns and France. After her father's death, Matey moves to Rustdorf, New York, where she eventually marries Adrian Fort, a man who shares her deep love for France. When war breaks out, the couple makes the daring choice to move their young family to Paris to assist their French friends, the Vinets, and provide relief work for soldiers. The novel concludes with the family's return to America, finding a hard-won sense of peace after the exhaustion and trauma of the war.

Sickly and sheltered, nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann is horrified to hear she must be sent away to live with the "Putney cousins." According to Aunt Harriet, these mysterious relations are cold-hearted, stiff-necked, as well as heavy-handed when it comes to the delegation of children's chores. But what will life at the Putney farm truly have in store for Betsy?

Semi-autobiographical series of incidents in the life of an intellectual American family in the late 19th - early 20th Century as seen by favored daughter, Sylvia Marshall. Her father is an economics professor in a Midwestern state university and she is following in his inquisitive footsteps. Canfield writes this in a matter-of-fact manner with Tarkingtonesque good humor.