A lively portrait of Marion Angus emerges from the letters she wrote to Mairi Campbell Ireland between November 1929 and the summer of 1931. The years in question marked a major turning point in her life. Her first volume, The Lilt, containing only twelve poems, had appeared in 1922. Nine of these poems were reprinted with seventeen new poems as The Tinker's Road in 1924. Twenty-five new poems came out as Sun and Candlelight in 1927 and a further twenty-four as The Singin’ Lass in 1929. The Turn of the Day dates from 1931. As will be seen, Angus looked on this book with some trepidation. It was in the nature of a retrospective, with only six new poems and substantial extracts from The Lilt and The Tinker's Road. One further book appeared in the remaining fifteen years of her life, Lost Country in 1937, containing twenty-nine poems, many of which had already appeared in periodicals.

So the rhythm of one volume every two or three years which Angus had established during the 1920s was broken at the start of the new decade. This interruption can in large measure be attributed to the traumatic events of 1930. In early April the poet's younger sister suffered a complete mental breakdown and was taken into care in Glasgow. The cottage at Hazelhead, Aberdeen, which had been their home, had to be sold and Angus effectively became a nomad. She writes from the home of her other sister, a minister's wife in Greenock; from a house at Crawfurd, Lasswade, south of Edinburgh, where she temporarily found refuge; and from Inchdowrie in Glen Clova, Angus, a favoured holiday destination. In 1931 her ailing sister emerged briefly from care but the experiment proved to be a mistake. Visits had subsequently to be restricted even if ‘I see always before me her savaged face and emaciated form’ (6 May 1931). Angus wondered if the breakdown would mark the end of her career as a poet, since ‘all the emotions, hopes, aspirations which might possibly at another time have found their way into poetry are for the present absorbed and used up in anxious care for my poor sister’ (16 February 1930).