The Bracknels

The Bracknels by Forrest Reid is a family-chronicle novel written in the early 20th century. It centers on a domineering, self-made patriarch and his uneasy household as a young English tutor, Hubert Rusk, enters their lives, with special attention to the fragile, inward Denis and his siblings Amy, May, and Alfred. The work explores authority, idleness, respectability, and clandestine desire as everyday domestic tensions brush against mysticism. The opening of the novel presents a tense breakfast in which the Bracknel daughters quiz their father about Denis’s new tutor, while the frail mother tries to keep the peace and the idle sons are conspicuously absent. We then follow Mr. Bracknel’s brooding: his pride and discontent, a discreet visit to Mary Brooke about his son John and the office girl Rhoda (whom Alfred is pursuing), and his decision to exile Alfred to a Swiss branch of the business. Rusk’s arrival is awkward—an icy car ride, a stiff dinner where Denis’s crystal-gazing provokes his father, and a drawing-room scene that ends in Amy’s jealous outburst—followed by a late-night talk in which Mrs. Bracknel pleads for patience with her peculiar, sensitive boy. At the start of Rusk’s tutorship, Amy flirts and interrupts, but a warm summer and daily work foster a bond between tutor and pupil; Denis confides his moon-obsessed inner life, leads Rusk to a hidden “altar” by a well, and admits to a troubling sacrifice, leaving the pair shaken and bound by a new, uneasy intimacy.

The Bracknels, by Forrest Reid. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #78427.