SOURCE: Avison, Margaret. “Reading Morley Callaghan's Such Is My Beloved.” Canadian Literature, no. 133 (summer 1992): 204-08.

In the following essay, Avison provides an appreciation of Callaghan's work, asserting that his spare narrative style may have been detrimental to his literary legacy.

Rereading this novel [Such Is My Beloved] impelled me to reread the many many other novels and stories to seek an overview of Morley Callaghan's work now that it is completed (although still there may be new books, collections of stories that so far have appeared only in the leading U.S. magazines of the 1920s and 1930s).

A conviction began to emerge. Gripping as his plots are, realistic as his settings and situations, Callaghan was all out, not so much for storytelling, as for utterance. I don't mean that there is any trace of the propagandist, the exhorter, the apologist, the schematizer, in him. Rather, he invites...