 After leaving Oxford, Greene worked for a period of time as a private 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."