Ford Madox Ford

Max Saunders

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781789147018
• eBook ISBN: 9781789147339
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Ford Madox Ford had a fascinating life, spent among several of the most important groups of artists and writers of his time. Friends with Henry James, H. G. Wells and above all Joseph Conrad, Ford was a leading figure of the avant-garde in pre-First World War London, publishing Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence in The English Review. After the war he founded The Transatlantic Review in Paris, helping to launch Hemingway and Jean Rhys. A prolific writer in his own right, Ford's best-known books are the modernist tour de force The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–8).
Drawing on recently discovered correspondence and photographs, this cogent new critical biography demonstrates Ford's vital contribution to modern fiction, poetry and criticism.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Youth: A Pre-Raphaelite Prodigy; Marriage to Elsie Martindale, 1873–94
• 2 Cosmopolitan Countryside: Impressionism on the Romney Marsh; Breakdown, 1894–1905
• 3 Edwardian London, the English Review and Violet Hunt, 1905–13
• 4 Impressionism, Modernist Poetics and The Good Soldier, 1913–15
• 5 War and Post-War Reconstruction: Stella Bowen, Paris, the transatlantic review, New York, 1915–29
• 6 Parade’s End: The Novelist as Historian of His Own Time, 1924–8
• Coda: ‘A Franco-American Writer’: Surviving the Depression with Janice Biala, 1930–39
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements