L. H. Myers was over forty when his first novel was published and did not come fully into his own as a writer until the appearance of The Near and the Far in 1929. L. P. Hartley calls the tetralogy, of which The Near and the Far is the first volume, "a tremendous and most complex work," and Myers was praised in similar terms by many of the best critics of his day, receiving close and respectful attention from D. W. Harding, Peter Quennell, and Walter Allen. Richard Church wrote of him that "most writers are children writing for children, Mr. Myers is an adult."

Leopold Hamilton Myers was born in Cambridge, England, on 6 September 1881. His father, Frederic W. H. Myers, was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research and the author of Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Evelyn Tennant Myers, Leo's mother, was...