Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal

The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. He is best-known for his fiction, especially the modernist masterpiece The Good Soldier, and the four books making up Parade’s End, described by Anthony Burgess as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’; and by Samuel Hynes as ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’. This series, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, has been founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in Ford’s life and work. Each volume will normally be based upon a particular theme or issue. Each will relate aspects of Ford’s work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. He published nearly eighty books, experimenting with a variety of genres. This first volume explores Ford’s diversity, focusing on the best of his less familiar work: his poetry, writings on art, and the novels A Call, The Simple Life Limited, The Marsden Case, and The Rash Act.