Graham Greene recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent consequence of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and divine grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin, and doubt. V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil. Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives –
Graham Greene tutor and then turned to journalism – first on the "Nottingham Journal", and then as a sub-editor on "The Times". While he was working in Nottingham, he started corresponding with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene was an agnostic at the time, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in "A Sort of Life", he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held." Greene was baptised on 26 February 1926 and