Robert Keable
Missionary, Author
1887 – 1927
Who was Robert Keable?
Robert Keable was a British novelist, formerly a missionary and priest in the Church of England. He resigned his ministry following his experiences in the First World War and caused a scandal with his 1921 novel Simon Called Peter, the tale of a priest's wartime affair with a young nurse. The book sold 600,000 copies in the 1920s alone, was referenced in The Great Gatsby, and was cited in a double murder investigation. Fêted in the United States, but critically less than well-received, Keable moved to Tahiti where he continued to write, producing both novels and theological works, until his death at age 40 of a kidney complaint.
Keable was raised in Bedfordshire and educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He entered a theological college after graduation and was ordained a priest in 1911. He spent the next several years as a missionary in Africa, stationed on Zanzibar and in Basutoland, before returning to Europe as an army chaplain during the First World War. There, he met and fell in love with a young nurse, Grace Eileen Joly Beresford Buck, a development over which he eventually quit the Church of England and left his wife, Sybil.
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- Born
- Mar 6, 1887
Bedfordshire - Spouses
- Profession
- Education
- University of Cambridge
- Magdalene College, Cambridge
- Died
- Dec 22, 1927
Tahiti
Submitted
on July 23, 2013
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