SOURCE: "J. D. Beresford," in Some Contemporary Novelists (Men), Leonard Parsons, 1922, pp. 97-119.

In the following essay, Johnson presents an overview of Beresford's writing career.

There is always an obvious danger in labels; though the temptation to grouping, since one must compare, becomes at times well-nigh irresistible. Mr W. L. George has divided modern novelists into "self-exploiters, mirror-bearers, and commentators": of whom those with most promise "stand midway between the expression of life and the expression of themselves; indeed, they try to express both, to achieve art by criticising life; they attempt to take nature into partnership."

Mr Beresford, certainly, is both a conventional novelist—in the accepted sense of the storyteller—and a modern analytic: at once reflecting and critical. He works through both mediums—self-expression and imagination or, more strictly, invention. He is, both ways, somewhat laboured, after the manner of his day, but he does...