In Single Strictness

Excerpt from In Single Strictness
For the unfolding of my subject more than one story was needed; but the temperaments of the people in the stories are so closely related that I look upon this book as a single narrative divided into five chapters; and the book's unity having been pointed out, it only remains for me to tell that the stories are all new with the exception of ten or a dozen pages borrowed from Celibates, a book written before I had reached my natural limits of literary expression, and that I found myself in the beginning of 1920 obliged to abandon any faintest hope I may have had of rewriting Celibates for the task of filling the gap with a new work entitled In Single Strictness. A gap in what rank? the reader asks, and I answer: In the books selected by me for the library edition which Mr. Horace Liveright is preparing, the first five narratives to be published this year. Mr. Liveright began by asking for twenty-five books, but I withstood him, saying that no author had more than twenty in him; and that gratitude to my American readers for their approval of my work when the English librarians stood aloof forbade the inclusion of books unworthy of their notice. But is there no other unworthy book among those I have agreed to publish? I asked myself.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.