SOURCE: "Flowers of Sterility," in The Spectator, Vol. 138, No. 5146, February 12, 1927, pp. 249-50.

Church was an English novelist, poet, autobiographer, and critic. In the following review, he offers a mixed assessment of Celibate Lives.

The five stories in [Celibate Lives] are all studies of people in whom the normal sex-life has been submerged under conflicting waves of spiritual impulse and fear. Abnormal senses of duty or exaggerated fastidiousness have forced these men and women along a path of experience which never sees the sun of common social life. In consequence, they seem to have a peculiar etiolated quality about them, an unhealthiness that attracts while it appals. They are Nature's wayward experiments, having nothing to do with the maintenance of the human race. Proceeding from that basic difference, the author shows its effect in social, intellectual, and erotic ramifications.

There is something of the quality of Sterne's Uncle Toby...