The Prisoners of Hartling

No artificial code of honor governs the action of “The Prisoners of Hartling.” The reader may wonder at our bringing Mr. Beresford into this company. But this is the Beresford of “The Jervaise Comedy,” not him of “Jacob Stahl.” He has here written a novel with an idea, rather than a novel of interpretation. He takes a motto from Ecclesiastes, “There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun: namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt.'' His is a familiar idea in British fiction, the idea of the enslavement of a large circle of blood-relations to the head of the family by reason of his autocratic powers for the ultimate disposal of that sacred possession, the family property. Mr. Beresford gives the situation a romantic turn by investing his ninety-five year old autocrat with almost uncanny powers of persuasion as well as of direct intimidation. His authority is a bubble; but it remains inviolate for generations, and only the dutch courage of love enables our hero to touch and shatter it. To tell the truth, our hero is not much of a hero, romantically speaking, and we don’t quite make out what his Eleanor (who does very well as a heroine) sees in him. So far as the Kenyon tribe at-large are concerned, the story ends with a punch worthy of our own most accomplished tale-smiths.
–The Independent [1922]

This story shows the force of a dominating personality and the inertia produced in those enmeshed in its web.
Arthur Woodroffe, a young ex-soldier, now a doctor’s assistant in Peckham, is invited by his aunt to spend a week-end at the country house of her father-in-law, Garvice Kenyon. He arrives, is shown into a room crowded with people, and is amazed when his aunt says, “We all live here.'' Mr. Kenyon, you see, is past ninety and worth about half a million pounds, and has kept the Kenyon clan dangling round him with great expectations for a quarter of a century.
Arthur is asked to remain as family physician, and drifts along from week to week, playing golf and billiards, thinking ruefully of his unrealized ambitions, and attending this wonderful old man with “some quality of supremacy.” Also, he falls in love with the granddaughter.
Only the eldest sister gets a penny of the money; but Arthur gains valuable experience, and will henceforth paddle his own canoe.
–The Universalist Leader, Vol. 25 [1922]