He built on this foundation with early forays into the psychoanalytic novel and
roman à thèse with
God's Counterpoint (1918) and
Revolution: A Novel (1921), respectively.
By the 1920s Virginia Woolf could record in her Diary (1978) her pleasure at being offered a chance to review Revolution , and the critic Abel Chevalley could argue in 1924 that of a group including D. H. Lawrence, Frank Swinnerton, and Hugh Walpole, Beresford was "[t]he one most equally endowed with that intelligence and that imagination of life which make good writers of fiction." However, from the late 1920s to his death, increasing financial necessity forced him to churn out novels and reviews frequently lacking the inspiration and quality of his earlier work. Though virtually ignored since his death, Beresford deserves a place in the history of the Georgian period and of the novel for his thematic innovations, notably his treatment of "unpleasant" topics of human pathology that drew on his extensive knowledge of psychology.
Beresford's short stories have perhaps more unjustly suffered a neglect similar to that of the novels, since the stories commonly capture an inspired moment and reflect the pleasure that he found in writing them because they did not require the endurance of novel writing.
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