The Heir was published by William Heinemann in 1922, the same year as Knole and the Sackvilles. It is a short novel — barely more than a novella — but one of Sackville-West’s most revealing works. Mr. Chase, a modest, practical man, inherits Donat Chase — a great Elizabethan house (unmistakably Knole in its grandeur) from a distant relative. He arrives intending to sell it, finding the upkeep absurd and the house impractical. But gradually, the house possesses him.
The possession is not supernatural but aesthetic and emotional: Chase cannot resist the beauty of the Long Gallery, the patina of centuries on stone and wood, the sense of continuity with generations who have lived and died within these walls. By the novel’s end, he has surrendered his independence to the house — he will not sell, he will serve it, he will be consumed by its maintenance as all its previous owners were.
Sackville-West is clearly writing about her own relationship with Knole — the house she loved with pathological intensity and could not inherit. The novel is a study of what it means to be possessed by beauty, to feel that a place has more claim on you than you have on it. Mr. Chase’s surrender is presented not as weakness but as a kind of vocation — the recognition that some things are worth more than personal comfort or rational self-interest.
Collecting The Heir
First edition (William Heinemann, London, 1922): Cloth, possibly with dust jacket (scarce).
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100