As for Me and My House in Never too Late to Read Classics

Apr 20, 2025 Manybooks rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian-history, canadiana, book-reviews, farming, journals, marriage, dysfunctional-family-dynamics, great-depression

Sinclair Ross' 1941 novel As For Me and My House thematically and contents wise covers both the ravages of Canadian prairie weather during the Great Depression (with snowstorms, sandstorms, droughts etc. but with sadly no to all least hardly any rain) and also the Bentleys' failed marriage (and thus equally their failed lives). And written as a series of diary entries over thirteen months, Sinclair Ross has Mrs. Bentley (and her first name actually never appears in As For Me and My House) writin Sinclair Ross' 1941 novel As For Me and My House thematically and contents wise covers both the ravages of Canadian prairie weather during the Great Depression (with snowstorms, sandstorms, droughts etc. but with sadly no to all least hardly any rain) and also the Bentleys' failed marriage (and thus equally their failed lives). And written as a series of diary entries over thirteen months, Sinclair Ross has Mrs. Bentley (and her first name actually never appears in As For Me and My House) writing about her joylessly bleak existence as a discontented minister's wife. But while what is being textually presented by Sinclair Ross in As For Me and My House is interesting, descriptive and nicely moodily brooding, I do especially as an older adult reader occasionally find it rather strange to have a male author writing as a woman in the first person and I am thus not always entirely sure whether Mrs. Bentley sounds completely and authentically like a woman would and/or should in As For Me and My House (although to be honest, I did not actually notice and pay any attention to this when we read As For Me and My House in grade eleven English in 1983 but I do notice this just a wee and tiny bit in 2025).

Now As For Me and My House starts with the Bentleys arriving in Horizon, Saskatchewan, their fourth small prairie town in twelve years, with Philip being a failed painter and Protestant minister, even though he actually does not believe in God, and Mrs. Bentley trying to be and rather unsuccessfully so a devoted minister’s wife after being forced to abandon her dreams of becoming a professional pianist. And yes, As For Me and My House shows that Philip and Mrs. Bentley both absolutely hate the church and the small opinionatedly judgmental Canadian prairie towns they are forced to endure and that this also makes them despise each other (and with Mrs. Bentley also being described by Sinclair Ross' words as feeling unworthy as a wife and as a woman because the one time she got pregnant the baby was stillborn). But indeed, while there are many horrifying, many painful and uncomfortable episodes and scenarios being shown and described by Mrs. Bentley's diary entries in As For Me and My House in kind of almost a list of pain and suffering, they are all told flatly in a monotone voice of quiet desperation, so that there is little to no emotion, no dramatics, no excitement at all in to be textually seen and encountered in As For Me and My House.

Add to this the Great Depression prairie weather (see above as to what this entails) and we as readers end up with a very tense and uncomfortable textual experience with As For Me and My House (with especially the relentless wind of the Great Depression era of the 1930s being shown as mercilessly blowing seeds off the farmers' fields, destroying, removing the soil, trapping Mrs. Bentley in her hated house, filling everything with dust and sand). And while As For Me and My House is thus and certainly not meant to be cheerful, Sinclair Ross' text and his descriptively realistic as well as imaginative and visually stunning sense of time, place and understated emotion absorbs and takes us as readers into a world of failed lives, abandoned dreams, prairie wind and resentment, into something that is both interesting, is both glorious and also at the same painfully textually uncomfortable (and also a solidly four star reading experience for me both in 1983 and equally so in 2025). ...more

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