Between 1930 and 1969 Richard Church published thirteen novels, including the autobiographical trilogy The Porch (1937), The Stronghold (1939), and The Room Within (1940). Church was primarily a poet, and the controlled passion of his poetry underlies everything he wrote. His work is fluent and traditional rather than dramatic or innovative; it is typical of British writing during the 1930s and most of the following two decades--as distant as possible from the "angry young men" of the late 1950s or the outspoken productions of the "swinging sixties."

Richard Thomas Church was born on 26 March 1893 in Battersea, in southeast London, the second of the two sons of Thomas John Church, a postal worker, and Lavina Annie Orton Church. His mother was distantly related to George Eliot, but the family tended to remain quiet about this fact: they considered the great novelist to have been immoral because she had lived with the philosopher George Henry...