Most critics of Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House give more critical attention to the narrated character, Philip, but the novel is Mrs. Bentley's journal; she is the maker of the story. Ross offers the reader an unusual experience: a male-authored text in which the reader is invited to identify with a feminine experience and perspective presented as the human one. Mrs. Bentley is both powerless -- oppressed in the spatial, temporal, physical, and marital spheres -- and a manipulator, whose attempts to bind her husband to her alienate some readers. In her diary, Mrs. Bentley struggles against her worst fear: her own unimportance. She articulates for readers the yearning that our lives mean something. Ross creates a tough-minded, ruthlessly frank, female narrator, one whose words name, and in the naming overcome, the conditions that threaten her.
