Although he was once considered a leader among the younger generation of Georgian novelists, J. D. Beresford currently stands as one of the most unjustly neglected figures of the period. His first novel, The Early History of Jacob Stahl (1911), praised by The New York Times (11 June 1911) as a brilliant psychological novel, rapidly established his reputation as a solid realistic novelist. At the height of his recognition in 1924, the critic Abel Chevalley argued that of a group including D. H. Lawrence, Frank Swinnerton, and Hugh Walpole, Beresford was "the one most equally endowed with that intelligence and that imagination of life which make good writers of fiction." From the late 1920s until his death, however, financial necessity forced Beresford to churn out novels and reviews that often lacked the inspiration and quality of his earlier work. He nevertheless deserves recognition on several scores. His tireless quest for truth led him to explore an astonishing range of ideas from materialism and realism to psychical research, psychoanalysis, Eastern mysticism, and Christian Science.
