Book details

England and the English is Ford Madox Ford's three-volume exploration of what it means to be English, here published in a single volume for the first time in the United Kingdom. Starting with the brilliantly impressionistic evocations of the chaotic energy of modern London in the first part, Ford proceeds to delve into the rural past that has always been identified as being at the heart of England, before concluding with an investigation of the formation of the English character. Throughout, Ford is the watchful outsider, perceptive, humorous and affectionate towards the complexities of Englishness. A fascinating introduction to the style and preoccupations of this seminal Modernist writer, England and the English has particular resonance for our own times when the sense of national identity is again under scrutiny.

 

This edition includes Ford's preface to the one-volume American edition. Sara Haslam's introduction sets the trilogy in its contemporary context and outlines its significance in Ford's work.

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.

 

Sara Haslam is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the Open University. She studied at the University of Liverpool, and King's College London, and was a founder member of the Ford Madox Ford Society, of which she is currently Chair. She is author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2002) and Life Writing (Routledge, 2009, with Derek Neale), and editor of Ford's The Good Soldier (Wordsworth, 2010) and England and the English (Carcanet, 2003) as well as Ford Madox Ford and the City, the fourth volume of International Ford Madox Ford Studies (2005). She has published essays on the literature of the First World War, on Modernism, and on Ford, Thomas Hardy, the Brontës and Henry James.