SOURCE: "Reservations about Mauriac," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. IX, No. 1, January, 1959, pp. 22-36.

Davies is an English educator and critic specializing in English literature of the Middle Ages. In the following essay, he argues that Mauriac is concerned with only a very narrow range of themes, and that, while he fails to address certain aspects of life in his novels, the power of his work is nevertheless at least partly related to the concentration of its focus.

Reading, pondering and re-reading the novels of M. Mauriac over the last eight years, I have not found my first and almost unqualified love for them much diminished. M. Mauriac speaks my language: I am immediately at home in his world because it seems to be my world, and, to me, what he is representing is life. The effect is one of illumination and sheer pleasure: he gets to the...