Robert Keable was a British novelist, missionary, and priest whose life and writings were deeply shaped by his complex relationship with the Christian faith. Born in Bedfordshire and educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Keable was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1911. He spent several years working as a missionary in Zanzibar and Basutoland before serving as an army chaplain during the First World War. His wartime experiences, including a relationship with a young nurse named Grace Eileen Joly Beresford Buck, led him to resign his ministry, leave his wife, and abandon the Church of England.
Keable turned to writing and achieved overnight literary celebrity with his debut novel, Simon Called Peter (1921). The book, which detailed a priest's wartime affair with a nurse, became an enormous bestseller, selling over 600,000 copies in the 1920s despite being banned and widely criticized for its scandalous content. Disillusioned with British society, Keable and Buck relocated to Tahiti in 1922. Following Buck's tragic death in childbirth in 1924, Keable's health declined, though he continued to write and later fathered a son with a Tahitian woman named Ina.
Throughout his career, Keable produced a diverse body of work that included novels, poetry, travel guides, and theological tracts. Much of his fiction was highly autobiographical, exploring his evolving attitudes toward the Christian religious establishment. His final non-fiction work, The Great Galilean, attempted to reconcile his enduring belief in God with his rejection of orthodox church dogmas. Keable died of kidney disease in Tahiti in 1927 at the age of 40, leaving behind a legacy of popular, boundary-pushing literature that foreshadowed mid-century ideas of free love.
