Cain’s desire to write a novel about “a grass widow with two small children to support” had its origins in 1932 from a suggestion by fellow writer James McGuiness, and went through numerous plot and character permutations during the years of the Great Depression.[5][6]
Mildred Pierce is the third of his four novels in which Cain incorporated Grand opera, for which he had trained as a baritone in his youth.[7]
Mildred Pierce is a deliberate departure from Cain’s earlier novels, yet it also culminates in his 1930s work. There is no killing, no crime, and no conflicts with the law in the story…the action is not concentrated into a narrow period of time, as in his earlier fiction, but stretches across the Depression...Cain was determined to create a broad social and temporal landscape through third-person reportage, as against the narrowly defined first-person focused on erotic obsessiveness…”[8]
Kate Cummings, mother of Hollywood actress Constance Cummings, became a friend, a lover and a literary advisor to Cain during the writing of Mildred Pierce. Their relationship ended in 1943, in part due to Cain’s heavy drinking.[9][10] Cummings provided Cain with insights essential to the development of his female protagonists in Mildred Pierce. Cain freely acknowledged that Cummings “saw me through” the writing of his “first serious novel.”[11][12]
By November 1941 Cain had completed two-thirds of the novel, but was struggling with adapting to writing in the third-person, his first effort in that narrative form.[13] Cain wrote publisher Blanche Knopf in 1940:
I am telling it ‘straight’ in the third-person, and am having plenty of trouble with it…probably I am not really a novelist. If I can pretend it is somebody else’s story, be sort of a secretary to the yarn, I do all right. When I try to step out on the stage myself, I get red behind the ears and boot it. Well, I shall finish it, wind, weather and tide permitting and we shall see.[14][15][16]
The novel required four rewrites before Cain completed Mildred Pierce in the spring of 1941 and sold it to Alfred A. Knopf publishers on a $5000 advance.[17]
