Book description
Ford Madox Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, is recognised
as one of the great British novels about the First World War. This
selection from his other extensive writings about the war, published
and unpublished, sheds light on the tetralogy. It includes
reminiscences, an unfinished novel, stories and excerpts from letters.
Ford was in his forties when he enlisted: this made him one of the few
writers of his maturity to fight on the Western Front. His experience
of combat was limited, but he was in the Battle of the Somme, was
often under bombardment, and suffered from shell-shock. His largely
psychological response to the war anticipates the recent renewal of
interest in trauma and shell-shock (as, for example, in Pat Barker's
Ghost Road trilogy). This book provides important testimony by one of
the best writers of his generation.
'His energetic work was indispensable to the "oncoming" of
modern English literature.' - Charlotte Taylor, The American Scholar
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.
