It is an epic about the US home front during World War II that was adapted and produced by David O. Selznick from the 1943 novel Since You Went Away: Letters to a Soldier from His Wife by Margaret Buell Wilder.

The film is set in a mid-sized American town, where people with loved ones in the armed forces try to cope with their changed circumstances and make their own contributions to the war effort.

"This is a story of the Unconquerable Fortress: the American Home...1943" In January 1943, Anne Hilton is an upper-middle-class housewife living in a Midwestern town near a military base with her two teenage daughters, Jane and Bridget ("Brig").

Anne has just returned from seeing her husband off to Camp Claiborne, and she and her daughters must adjust to Tim's absence and make other sacrifices for the war effort, including food rationing; planting a victory garden; giving up the services of their loyal maid Fidelia who nevertheless offers to continue working part-time for the Hiltons while foregoing wages; and taking in a boarder, the curmudgeonly retired Colonel Smollett.

Jane is determined to do more for the war effort and begins volunteering as a nurses' aide at the nearby military hospital, where returning veterans with physical and mental injuries are sent to recover.

According to The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, Since You Went Away features a script with an "excess of exhausting emotional detail"; Crowther was impressed with the performances, but had issues with the film as a whole:[4] As the mother and center of the family, Claudette Colbert gives an excellent show of gallantly self-contained emotion, and Jennifer Jones is surpassingly sweet as a well-bred American daughter in the first bloom of womanhood and love.

Monty Woolley makes a full-blown character of the man who comes to lodge; Joseph Cotten is droll as the Navy playboy, and Hattie McDaniel does an Andy-act quite well... No doubt, this would have been a sharper picture if Mr. Selznick had played it in much less time, and it would have been considerably more significant had he kept it somewhat closer to average means.

And that is all this picture really does.Literary critic Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic registers this appraisal: Since You Went Away holds religiously to a philosophy consisting in the ideas that only happy, virtuous or funny things happen in the American home, that only the pretty and the brave live there, that any complications should be more than balanced by happy rewards…As a whole, the picture is doughy and inconsequential as the bread you get in the grocery store…For its length, this is as ineffectual a movie as I ever saw.”[5]The movie was successful and earned $4,950,000 in North American rentals during its theatrical release, and over $7 million in rentals overall.