John Davys Beresford was a restless and passionate seeker of truth whose quest led him to explore a range of ideas from materialism and realism to psychic research, psychoanalysis, Eastern mysticism, and Christian Science. An underlying idealism informs his writing in all of the genres that he experimented with, including the realistic, fantasy, psychological, and mystical novel; short stories of these types; and essays and reviews on literary, psychological, philosophical, and mystical topics. In a stream-of-consciousness passage from Writing Aloud (1928), he asserted that he had "but a single theme, the re-education of human beings."

He found an audience for this concern in 1911 with his first two novels, one realistic and one fantasy, and reviewers quickly tagged him as one of the most promising of the younger generation of Georgian novelists. His Jacob Stahl trilogy (The Early History of Jacob Stahl [1911], A Candidate for Truth [1912], and The Invisible Event...