Sinclair Ross is best known as the author of As for Me and My House (1941), perhaps the most critically contested English-Canadian novel, narrated by a minister-cum-thwarted-artist's neurotic, possessive, duplicitous, and — in my opinion (Meindl 2002, 23) — ultimately generous and caring wife. “The Lamp at Noon” (first published in Queen's Quarterly 1938), a story set in the period's economically depressed Canadian West, like his classic modernist novel, also features strained marital relations and a complex female protagonist.

From a biographical viewpoint, James Sinclair Ross (1908–96) strikes one as an unlikely candidate for providing insight into gender issues, particularly women's problems and plights. Born on a homestead near the town of Prince Albert in northern Saskatchewan, he grew up on prairie farms, where his mother worked as a housekeeper. He left high school prematurely and took up employment with the Union Bank of Canada. Unlike modernism's most famous bank clerk, T. S. Eliot, Ross never left his bank job, but broadened his experiences through transfers to Winnipeg (1933) and Montreal (1946), a stint with the Canadian Army in England, and, after his retirement in 1968, a dozen years in Greece and Spain before his return to Canada. One year after his death, a friend's memoir disclosed Ross's homosexuality (Fraser 1997), which may have spurred the theme of problematic marriage in many of his stories and which has since promoted interest in their sexual subtexts (Lesk 1997).

Ross's eighteen short stories (published between 1934 and 1972, though only few of them after 1952) gradually came to reflect his urban and military experience, as did his less well received novels following As for Me and My House (The Well, 1958, and Whir of Gold, 1970), whereas Sawbones Memorial (1974), Ross's last novel, successfully returns to the territory of his first and best: western small-town life with its conventional, spiritually impoverished propriety. His reputation as a writer had been firmly established in 1957 by the re-issue of As for Me and My House in the New Canadian Library series, which also brought out The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories (1968), the latter containing nine re-issued and revised stories, all of them rural or small-town in setting.