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.

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 kidney disease.

There, he met and began a relationship 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.

Keable's most famous publication was his first novel, Simon Called Peter, but he produced a prodigious literary output, spanning theological tracts through poetry to travel guides.

As well as these fictional explorations he produced a final, non-fiction work, The Great Galilean, outlining the religious views he developed during a lifetime's uneasy relationship to Anglicanism and Catholicism.

Keable's was an austere, Anglican upbringing, the effect of which, his biographer Hugh Cecil has suggested, was to leave the young man industrious, somewhat preacherly in his writing style, and with a devoutness not particularly tied to the specific faith in which he'd been raised.

[15] Instead, he made two attempts to enlist for armed service during the First World War; ill health thwarted both,[8] so he returned to Africa for mission work, becoming rector of three parishes (including Leribe, Basutoland),[5] under the diocese of the Bishop of Bloemfontein.

The damaging effects of the illness he had suffered were compounded by an assault while in the field: accounts vary, with some friends recalling that Keable received a blow to the head from a "powerful native",[17] and others describing a gunshot wound to the thigh, inflicted by a local Mosutu man.

The pair had met in Bradford; Sybil was "passionately religious, with a strong social conscience and robust health... a big, handsome (some thought beautiful) woman with auburn hair.

The men to whom he ministered, he came to believe, cared nothing for the finer points of Anglican theological dispute: from the church they wanted only "entertainment and a barely spiritual form of practical Christianity.

"[21] Keable argued as much openly, suggesting that the Protestant chaplaincy in France should be amalgamated into the operations of the YMCA, and that only the Roman Catholic padres – who seemed to have quite a different, more immediate relationship with their Celtic and Lancastrian companies – should remain.

A smoker, he was known to share whisky and sodas in the officers' mess, and – as does the title character in Simon Called Peter – to have become acquainted with a devoutly religious French prostitute.

Sybil converted and became a devout Catholic, but Keable also read works in contemporary philosophy and the books of Charles Darwin, and appears briefly to have lost his faith altogether.

He commenced The Mother of All Living, "an intense love-drama set in South Africa", which reflected his new interest in African traditional religion and featured a Bergsonian concept of "life-force" as an alternative to theology.

He concluded that Buck had a right to pursue relationships with other men, though there is no firm evidence that she did, and "that a warm and spontaneous sexual nature, far from being in conflict with Christian love, was in fact a manifestation of it.

His views scandalised the contemporary press, but Frank Weston noted in correspondence that Keable as a "shipwrecked priest" made quite a useful cautionary tale for novices.

Buck drove a Dodge and enjoyed Tahiti's ample supplies of cheap French wine; Keable "brooded on Gauguin's gesture against spiritual suffocation",[34] and eventually moved the household further inland, to a traditional Tahitian-style house in the wilder surrounds of Teahuahu, near Papeari.

The grief-stricken Keable's own health worsened and he was advised to return to Tahiti; the baby, deemed too weak to travel, was left in England with Jack and Rita Elliott, friends of the couple's since the Ralston Street salon days.

Nonetheless, he completed the novel Numerous Treasure, which he had begun before Buck's death; the bittersweet tale of a Polynesian woman who shared her name with a cocktail and a brand of cigarettes[16][39] was a commercial success, and has been considered a valuable portrait of early-century Tahitian life.

[42] The tale of a Catholic priest restored to faith by a woman's love was, however, poorly received, and the follow-up Madness of Monty, a "kindly, innocuous comedy", went over worse still.

The New York Times reviewer called it hopelessly muddled, finding Keable's claims about the unknowability of Jesus contrary to his efforts to understand and worship him: "Frankly, we do not know what to make of it.

His novels were equated with Mrs Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, a similarly scandalous tale of religious doubt among the clergy published 40 years earlier: H.D.A.

The transition from the beautiful book on The Loneliness of Christ (1914) – of his Central African period – to Simon Called Peter (1921) came as a great shock to all who had known and loved him in earlier days.

", expressed the fascination of this disconnect overtly, responding to a piece titled "The censorship of thought" that Keable had contributed to a 1922 volume, Nonsenseorship (sic), after Simon Called Peter's publication had made him notorious.

wrote, noting the romance of Keable's unusual circumstances: "From a quiet English clergyman to the author of a sensational best-seller who has taken up his permanent residence in the South Seas seems a long jump."

[60] A great deal of media coverage of Simon Called Peter concerned its involvement in a prominent United States court case, over the double murder in New Brunswick, New Jersey of Edward Wheeler Hall, a rector, and Elenor Mills, a married member of his congregation, with whom he had been conducting an affair.

"[24] In response to the banning in Boston of another of his books, Numerous Treasure, he wrote to his editor George Putnam that he had in the past month received fanmail from a bookseller, a request for his photograph from a girls' high school library, and "an intimation that I had been adopted as the literary patron of a class at an American university.

[54]Keable's distinction between the historical and the traditional Jesus, Wilson argued, was ultimately muddled and internally inconsistent, his verdicts on the illiberality of the contemporary church at odds with his own abiding conviction.

[72] Biographer Hugh Cecil, including Keable in his 1995 anthology of neglected Great War writers,[73] concluded: From early in his career he had used his talents to the full and seized life with both hands.

His works, though seldom read now, were no mean achievement, intellectually or artistically, even if their high quality was rarely sustained throughout a whole book... Robert Keable was quintessentially the divided twentieth century man, yearning for self-realization and for a faith, and full of guilt and self-hatred.