Editorial review

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