Book description
Some Do Not..., the first volume of
Parade's End, introduces the central characters:
Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant mathematician; his dazzling,
unfaithful wife Sylvia; and the young Suffragette Valentine Wannop. It
starts with the cataclysmic weekend that throws Tietjens and Valentine
together. It ends in 1917 as the two are on the verge of becoming
lovers, before Tietjens prepares to return to the Front and probable
death.
Some Do Not... is an unforgettable exploration of the
tensions of a society facing catastrophe, as the energies of sexuality
and power erupt into violence.
Some Do Not... includes: the first reliable text, based
on the manuscript and first editions; a major critical introduction by
Max Saunders, Ford's acclaimed biographer; an account of the novel's
composition and reception; a reconstruction of Ford's dramatic
original ending, published complete for the first time; annotations
explaining historical references, military terms, literary and topical
allusions; a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of
significant deletions and revisions; a bibliography of further
reading.
Ford Madox Ford (the name he adopted in 1919: he was originally Ford
Hermann Hueffer) was born in Merton, Surrey, in 1873. His mother,
Catherine, was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox
Brown. His father, Francis Hueffer, was a German emigre, a musicologist
and music critic for The Times. Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
were his aunt and uncle by marriage. Ford collaborated with Joseph
Conrad from 1898 to 1908, and also befriended many of the best writers
of his time, including Henry James, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, John
Galsworthy and Thomas Hardy. He is best known for his novels, especially
The Fifth Queen (1906 - 8), The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade's End
(1924 - 8). Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment 1915 - 19.
After the war he moved to France. In Paris he founded the transatlantic
review, taking on Ernest Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering Jean
Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
In the 1920s and 1930s he moved between Paris, New York, and Provence.
He died in Deauville in June 1939. The author of over eighty books, Ford
is a major presence in twentieth-century writing. Max Saunders is
Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing
Research at King's College London, where he teaches modern English,
European, and American literature. He studied at the universities of
Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Research Fellow and then College
Lecturer at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of Ford Madox
Ford: A Dual Life (2 vols, Oxford University Press, 1996) and Self
Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern
Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010); the editor of Ford's
Selected Poems, War Prose, and (with Richard Stang) Critical Essays
(Carcanet, 1997, 1999, 2002). He has published essays on Life-writing,
on Impressionism, and on Ford, Conrad, James, Forster, Eliot, Joyce,
Rosamond Lehmann, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, Lawrence, Freud,
Pound, Ruskin, Anthony Burgess and others.
