SOURCE: "Introduction," in Intention and Achievement: An Essay on the Novels of François Mauriac, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 1-8.

In the following excerpt, Flower discusses Mauriac as a "Catholic novelist. "

With the exception of one of his earliest critics, Charles du Bos, and more recently Professor Stratford, and in spite of the apparent content of a number of critical studies, no commentators have paid adequate attention to the basic problem of the Catholic novel and to Mauriac's consideration of it. It has, to be sure, been acknowledged as a distinctive form but only in as much as it is a piece of writing which bears witness in some way to the Catholic faith. In other words it is a form of committed literature, but beyond this little attention has been given to the limiting effects of this commitment nor has the basic problem of incorporating a personal...