Against a Darkening Sky

This novel, published in 1942, is set in a semi-rural community south of San Francisco in the 1930s. The central character, Mary Perrault, is a Scottish immigrant married to a Swiss gardener. The focus of the novel is on her parenthood and her role as friend and leader in the local community. It's an account of survival in the Great Depression and is shaped by the author's own experience and that of her friends living in the same context.

The author, Janet Lewis (born 17 August 1899), the daughter of a professor of English literature, grew up in Chicago. Her brother, Herbert, served in the army during the First World War. Her first appearances in print were contributions to a high-school literary magazine alongside those of Ernest Hemingway. She studied at the University of Chicago and as a student was an active member of the city's poetry club. Chiefly a poet, her first collection of poems was published in 1922. She had married a fellow poet, Yvor Winters, in 1926 and they moved to California when he was appointed to a position at Stanford. The two ran a literary magazine, which they had founded, from 1929 to 1931. Her first novel appeared in 1932 and she went on to write a further four novels, the most acclaimed of which is the historical novel The Wife of Martin Guerre, published in 1941.

When a friend of the family is killed, the Perraults, even though they have endured hardship, feel unaccustomed to this kind of event:
“Tragedy such as this was unreal to the Perraults, and doubly unreal since it was in the paper. The newsprint gave it, for them, the quality of fiction — something read of, not experienced. They were not able to believe that something so dreaded had actually happened to someone whom they knew. So they watched the papers through the ensuing days...”