Journal Entries by Mrs Bentley

Mrs Bentley, wife of a Protestant minister, she wrote journal entries regularly. The couple moved to another small town, called “Horizon”. Mrs. Bentley, was the loss hope for Philip (her husband), who became far more distant. As she notes her feelings, she is clear, as she suspects her husband, is nothing but contempt of her husband’s flock. Mrs. Bentley sees herself and Philip as failed actors; She has passion for music and, in her youth, she dream of becoming a successful pianist, and she spends much of her time sketching and painting.

Her diary tell most of her efforts to win her husband’s love, but she appears to overcome her efforts. She contacts Paul, a local teacher and philologist, as Philip encourages Judith’s love. They tried to adopt a Catholic child, Steve, who apparently fulfilled Philip’s desire for a child who could not get Mrs Bentley out, but this arrangement had fallen. Ultimately, under pressure from an increasingly aggressive congregation, they are preparing to move to a city. However, it is clear that the congregation and the male neighbors who adore the mansion listening to her piano training and the audience for her church rendition are very important-but Mrs. Bentley is unnoticed by her retreat for them and, remembering their applause for her piano performance. They moved to a mid-sized prairie city in the midst of the Great Depression, Mrs. Bentley in the establishment of a second-hand bookstore there as a way of escape from their unpleasant life in a small town is patent absurd. Judith, who mysteriously became pregnant, died after she gave birth and The Bentleys adopted her child.

As for Me and My House, the novel by Sinclair Ross (New York, 1941; Toronto, 1957), illustrates the social and natural threats to cut off marriage. Philip Bentley, an actor who became a minister, and his wife moved to Horizon, a small town of Saskatchewan. Their story tells the diary form by Mrs Bentley, with the description of the fake Horizon stores increasingly signifying the false lives of Bentley. She also records the brutal oppression of a prestigious and puritanical environment in society, and continues to threaten the natural environment invading the town’s structures with seasonal sheets of heat and cold, dust and snow.

The novel closes on the Bentleys that fortifies the child who is not legitimate by Philip, who is determined to make a new life beyond the Horizon. Ross describes the trials of the little town life in the Prairie with the style of repeated and beautiful clarity.