From Amazon
In "wind-swept, sun-burned little Horizon," Sinclair Ross sets
As for Me and My House and his big, human themes of isolation, alienation and unrealized ambition. Our narrator, Mrs. Bentley, uses a diary to detail life with her husband Philip, the artist who puts aside his painting to become a small-town preacher. "What he is and what he nearly was. The failure, the compromise, the going on." Mrs. Bentley too had aspirations but gave them up to marry Philip. Her writing reveals just how brittle their relationship has become: "For hypocrisy wears hard on a man who at heart really isn't that way. As far back as I can remember, it's always been there, darkening, draining him, but with Horizon now it seems to be gathering for a crisis."
Even with disaster looming, the uneventful chronicling of a clergyman and his wife struggling through the Depression in Saskatchewan might sound dull. That is, until the reader realizes how absorbing Mrs. Bentley's ambiguous and layered diary entries can be. Ross leaves it to us to decide whether our narrator is sincere or deceptive, shrewdly aware or deep in denial, as she chronicles her interactions with her husband, the townspeople, and the false fronts which surround them. It's this complexity that makes Mrs. Bentley one of the most engaging characters in Canadian fiction and draws generations of readers back to tiny Horizon, Sask. --Carolyn Leitch
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Sinclair Ross was born on a homestead near Shelbrooke in northern Saskatchewan in 1908. He dropped out of school after grade eleven to work in a bank. After working in many small-town banks in Saskatchewan, he transferred to a bank in Winnipeg in 1933. In 1941 he published his first novel,
As For Me and My House, with its evocation of prairie life during the Depression. The prairie is the major setting for his two collections of short fiction,
The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories and
The Race and Other Stories.
From 1942 until 1946 Ross served with the Canadian army in London, England. In 1946 he returned briefly to Winnipeg before settling in Montreal, where he continued in banking until his retirement in 1968.
Ross’ later novels,
The Well,
Whir of Gold, and
Sawbones Memorial, continue his exploration of prairie life and its power to challenge as well as sustain its inhabitants.
Upon his retirement Ross lived in Greece and then in Spain. He returned to Montreal in 1980, and two years later moved to Vancouver.
Sinclair Ross died in Vancouver in 1996.
From the Paperback edition.