Critical Essays

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 published his first book, a children's fairytale, when he was seventeen. He 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). He was also an influential poet and critic, and a brilliant magazine editor. He founded the English Review in 1908, discovering D.H.Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, who became another close friend. 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. Of his novels, Carcanet publish The Good Soldier, Parade's End, The Rash Act and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. Carcanet also publish The English Novel, The Ford Madox Ford Reader, A History of Our Own Time and Selected Poems, War Prose, Return to Yesterday, and other titles. Some of these have been released as part of The Millennium Ford series, which aims to bring all his major work back into circulation. 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. RICHARD STANG is a Professor Emeritus of Washington University in St Louis. His previous publications include The Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870 (Columbia University Press) and Discussions of George Eliot (Boston).