Book description
Last Post, the fourth and final volume of
Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day.
Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex
with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing
perspectives, Ford explores the tensions between his characters in a
changing world, haunted by the experience of war, facing an insecure
future for themselves and for England. The Tietjens' ancestral home
has been let to an American, its great tree felled; those like
Tietjens who have served in the war find there is no place for them in
a demoralised civilian society. The celebrations of Armistice Day have
been replaced by the uncertainties of peacetime. 'How are we to live?'
asks Valentine, as a death and an imminent birth bring Ford's great
sequence to a close.
Last Post includes:
-- the first reliable
text based on the hand-corrected typescript of first editions
--
a major critical introduction by Paul Skinner, editor of Ford's novel
No Enemy and of Ford Madox Ford: Literary Contacts
(International Ford Madox Ford Studies 6)
-- an account of the
novel's composition and reception
-- annotations explaining
historical references and literary and topical allusions
-- a
full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant
deletions and revisions
-- a bibliography of further reading
'...Parade's End... is panoramic and beautifully written. It is a
condemnation of the brutal senselessness and stupid waste of war.
Through its fascinating scenic technique it paints detailed, intimate
pictures of tents on the French battlefield, spa towns in Germany, the
Inns of Court in the City, and English country estates, and it peoples
these places with convincing characters who stay in the mind, especially
Sylvia and Christopher Tietjens.' Edmund White, New York Review of Books
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 emigré, 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.
Paul Skinner took his first degree at the University of the West
of England as a mature student, and later completed a PhD on Ford
Madox Ford and Ezra Pound at the University of Bristol. He has since
taught at both universities, and published articles on Ford, Pound and
Rudyard Kipling. His edition of Ford's No Enemy was published by
Carcanet in 2002. In 2007 he edited Ford Madox Ford's Literary
Contacts, volume 6 of International Ford Madox Ford Studies. He was a
bookseller for many years and now works in publishing.
