1915 novel by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a best-selling American author in the early decades of the twentieth century. “The Bent Twig” became the first of Dorothy Canfield's novels that described in fictional form the Montessori Method and offered the understanding of education and human development that she gained in Rome while visiting Maria Montessori. The novel touches upon the questions of gender roles, race relations, substance abuse, the environment, and the welfare of children. It makes the book urgent even today. Following the young life of a self-willed daughter of a university professor, the book, like all Fisher’s novels, is autobiographical to some degree. The heroine, Sylvia Marshall, tries to resist the bending of her early years with the entire mutinous soul.