Prodigal Daughters

The war is over, and Colonel Trelawney returns home expecting to find his kingdom intact. Instead, he discovers two strangers wearing his daughters' faces. His girls have cut their hair, shortened their hemlines, and embraced a new moral code that speaks of freedoms he never taught them. The Edwardian world he fought to preserve has crumbled not from German shells, but from within his own household. As father and daughters circle each other across an unbridgeable divide of class and generation, Hocking captures something painfully true about what war actually costs: not just the lives it takes, but the certainties it destroys. The 1923 silent film adaptation starring Gloria Swanson brought this generational fracture to millions, and the tension between parental fear and youthful rebellion remains urgently familiar a century later. For readers who savor period fiction that asks uncomfortable questions about progress, tradition, and what we owe to those we love, Prodigal Daughters offers a window into a world remaking itself one fractured family at a time.