Ford Madox Ford

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The English author Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is best known for his novels "The Good Soldier" and "Parade's End". An outstanding editor, he published works by many significant writers of his era.

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, England, on Dec. 17, 1873, the son of Dr. Francis Hueffer, a German, who was once music editor of the Times. His maternal grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, the painter, had been one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and an aunt was the wife of William Rossetti. In 1919 he changed his name from Hueffer to Ford, for reasons that were probably connected with his complicated marital affairs. He was educated in England, Germany, and especially France, and it is said that he first thought out his novels in French.

By the age of 22 Ford had written four books, including a fairy tale, The Brown Owl, written when he was 17 and published when he was 19. In 1898 Joseph Conrad, on the recommendation of William Ernest Henley, suggested that Ford become his collaborator, and the result was collaboration on The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), parts of Nostromo, and The Nature of a Crime. Ford's Joseph Conrad (1924) discusses the techniques they used.

In 1908 Ford began the periodical English Review in order to publish Thomas Hardy's "The Sunday Morning Tragedy," which had been rejected everywhere else. Other contributors included Conrad, William James, W. H. Hudson, John Galsworthy, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Norman Douglas, Wyndham Lewis, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, and Anatole France. After World War I Ford founded the Transatlantic Review, which numbered among its contributors James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.

In 1914 Ford published what he intended to be his last novel, The Good Soldier. Out of his experiences in wartime England and service in a Welsh regiment, he then wrote the series of novels that is chiefly responsible for his high reputation: Some Do Not, No More Parades, and A Man Could Stand Up, published in 1924-1926, and the final volume, The Last Post, published in 1928. The view of war in these has been described as detached and disenchanted, and the novels are innovative as well as traditional. His novels were not widely read, but a revival of interest in his work began with New Directions 1942, a symposium by distinguished writers, dedicated to his memory. His war tetralogy was republished in 1950-1951 as Parade's End, along with The Good Soldier.

In his later years Ford preferred life in Provence and the United States, spending his last years as a teacher at Olivet College in Michigan with the professed aim of restoring the lost art of reading. Ford wrote more than 60 books. Among these works were volumes of poetry, critical studies (The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, 1929; Return to Yesterday, 1932), and memoirs (It Was the Nightingale, 1933; Mightier Than the Sword, 1938). Ford Madox Ford died at Beauville, France, on July 26, 1939.

Further Reading

An excellent critical study of Ford's career is R. W. Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art (1964). Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (1971), is a thorough study. See also Douglas Goldring, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: A Record of the Life and Writings of Ford Madox Ford (1948; published as Trained for Genius, 1949); John A. Meixner, Ford Madox Ford's Novels: A Critical Study (1962); Paul L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (1962); and H. Robert Huntley, The Alien Protagonist of Ford Madox Ford (1970). For discussions of particular novels see Robie Macaulay's introduction to Parade's End (1950) and Mark Schorer's introduction to The Good Soldier (1951).

Additional Sources

Ford, Ford Madox, It was the nightingale, New York: Octagon Books, 1975, 1933.

Judd, Alan, Ford Madox Ford, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Saunders, Max, Ford Maddox Ford: a dual life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Ford, Ford Madox (1873–1939), British author. Among his over 80 books are four for children, three of them written before his 21st birthday. Two of them are quite remarkable, combining classic fairy‐tale themes and characters with sometimes poetic, sometimes comic invention. They also comment on—and in one case actually predict—the events of his own life.

Ford's first literary fairy tale, The Brown Owl, appeared in 1891, when he was barely 18. It is the story of an energetic young princess whose father has died, leaving her in the charge of an evil magician. She is protected by a brown owl who eventually turns out to be the spirit of her dead father. Two years before this story was written, Ford's father had also died. Ford and his brother went to live with their grandfather, the painter Ford Madox Brown, while their sister Juliet, then only 8, was sent to live with her uncle, William Rossetti, the most practical and conventional member of a very bohemian family. It seems possible that in this story Ford was sending a message to his sister Juliet, urging her to let their grandfather Brown, rather than their uncle, take the place of the lost father.

Ford's next literary fairy tale, The Feather (1892) is a complex and rambling story which mixes fairy‐tale characters with Greek mythology. The protagonist, another independent and enterprising princess, goes on a supernatural voyage to the moon, where Diana lives in a temple made entirely of green cheese. The tale also seems to reflect Ford's courtship of Elsie Martindale, the 15‐year‐old girl whom he would marry two years later. The king in The Feather, like Elsie's rich, highly respectable father, opposes his daughter's suitor.

The Queen who Flew (1894), Ford's best book for children, is lively, imaginative, and highly untraditional. Its heroine, young Queen Elfrida, is subject to a sour, reactionary regent named Lord Blackjowl; later on another unpleasant black‐bearded man called King Mark tries to kill her because she has refused to marry him. She escapes from both of these disagreeable father‐figures with the help of a talking bat, and in the end marries a ploughman and goes off to live happily ever after in a country cottage. The story foreshadows real events: when Elsie was sent away to the country to put her out of her suitor's reach, she eluded her chaperone and returned to London, where she and Ford were quickly married; he was 20 and she 17. After the wedding, they went to live in the country.

Ford's last juvenile work, Christina's Fairy Book (1906), is a collection of stories and poems written for or about his and Elsie's two young daughters, Christina (born 1897) and Katherine (born 1900). Though it has moments of wit and charm, it is weaker and slighter than The Brown Owl or The Feather, and in many of the tales the fairies are tiny, silly, helpless creatures who wear cowslip caps, as in many then‐popular, now forgotten books for children.

Bibliography

• Lurie, Alison, ‘Ford Madox Ford's Fairy Tales’, Children's Literature, 8 (1979).
• MacShane, Frank (ed.), Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage (1972).
• Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996).
• Weiss, Timothy, Fairy Tale and Romance in Works of Ford Madox Ford (1984).

— Alison Lurie

Quotes:

"Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst."

Ford Madox Ford
Born	December 17, 1873(1873-12-17) Merton, Surrey
Died	June 26, 1939 (aged 65) Deauville, France
Pen name	Ford Hermann Hueffer, Ford Madox Hueffer
Occupation	novelist, publisher
Nationality	United Kingdom
Writing period	1892 - ????

Ford Madox Ford (December 17, 1873 – June 26, 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature.^{[citation needed]} He is now best remembered for The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade's End tetralogy.

Born Ford Hermann Hueffer, the son of Francis Hueffer, he was Ford Madox Hueffer before he finally—in 1919, at a time when German connotations proved unpopular—settled on the name Ford Madox Ford in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written.

Contents 1 Ford's literary life 2 Ford's promotion of literature 3 Later life 4 Name 5 Selected works 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

Ford's literary life

One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two "perfect couples" using intricate flashbacks. In a "Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford” that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier “the finest French novel in the English language!”

Ford was involved in the British war propaganda after the outbreak of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau managed by C. F. G. Masterman with other writers and scholars who were popular in those years, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915).

After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted in the Welsh Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924-1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I.

Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoir and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on two novels, The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903).

His novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised in 1935)^[1] is, in a sense, the reverse of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Ford's promotion of literature

In 1908, he founded The English Review, in which he published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, France, he made friends with James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). Known in his role as critic for the statement "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Refer also to the Page 99 Test [2]. In a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Despite his deep Victorian roots, Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended bitterly.^[2]

Later life

Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

Name

• Ford went through several name changes. He was baptized Ford Hermann Hueffer, but later adopted his mother's name of Madox. Later he claimed he was Baron Hueffer von Aschendorf, but, after World War I, wanting to disavow his German background, he finally settled on Ford Madox Ford.^[3]

Selected works

• The Shifting of the Fire, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
• The Brown Owl, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
• The Queen Who Flew: A Fairy Tale, Bliss Sands & Foster, 1894
• The Cinque Ports, Blackwood, 1900.
• The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Heinemann, 1901.
• Rossetti, Duckworth, [1902].
• Romance, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Smith Elder, 1903.
• The Benefactor, Langham, 1905.
• The Soul of London, Alston, 1905.
• The Heart of the Country, Duckworth, 1906.
• The Fifth Queen, Alston, 1906.
• Privy Seal, Alston, 1907.
• An English Girl, Methuen, 1907.
• The Fifth Queen Crowned, Nash, 1908.
• Mr Apollo, Methuen, 1908.
• The Half Moon, Nash, 1909.
• A Call, Chatto, 1910.
• The Portrait, Methuen, 1910.
• The Critical Attitude, as Ford Madox Hueffer, Duckworth 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
• The Simple Life Limited, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1911.
• Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Constable, 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
• The Panel, Constable, 1912.
• The New Humpty Dumpty, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1912.
• Henry James, Secker, 1913.
• Mr Fleight, Latimer, 1913.
• The Young Lovell, Chatto, 1913.
• Between St Dennis and St George, Hodder, 1915.
• The Good Soldier, Lane, 1915.
• Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt, Lane, 1915.
• The Marsden Case, Duckworth, 1923.
• Women and Men, Paris, 1923.
• Mr Bosphorous, Duckworth, 1923.
• The Nature of a Crime, with Joseph Conrad, Duckworth, 1924.
• Some Do Not..., Duckworth, 1924.
• No More Parades, Duckworth, 1925.
• A Man Could Stand Up, Duckworth, 1926.
• New York is Not America, Duckworth, 1927.
• New York Essays, Rudge, 1927.
• New Poems, Rudge, 1927.
• Last Post, Duckworth, 1928.
• A Little Less Than Gods, Duckworth, [1928].
• No Enemy, Macaulay, 1929.
• The English Novel, Constable, 1930.
• When the Wicked Man, Cape, 1932.
• The Rash Act, Cape, 1933.
• It Was the Nightingale, Lippincott, 1933.
• Henry for Hugh, Lippincott, 1934.
• Provence, Unwin, 1935.
• Ladies Whose Bright Eyes(revised version), 1935
• Great Trade Route, OUP, 1937.
• Vive Le Roy, Unwin, 1937.
• The March of Literature, Dial, 1938.
• Selected Poems, Randall, 1971.
• Your Mirror to My Times, Holt, 1971.

References

1. ^ Richard A. Cassell, "The Two Sorrells of Ford Madox Ford", in Modern Philology, Vol. 59, No. 2, November 1961, pp. 114-121 [1]
2. ^ Jean Rhys
3. ^ Henry James: A Life, Leon Edel, c. 1985, p. 523.

Further reading

• John Attridge, "Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology," in Modernism/modernity 15:2 ([3] April 2008), 297-315.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ford Madox Ford

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Ford Madox Ford

• Ford Madox Ford Society Members of the Ford Madox Ford Society get a free copy of new books published in the International Ford Madox Ford Studies series; see the Society website for details.
• A biography of Ford
• Literary Encyclopedia entry on Ford
• Works by Ford Madox Ford at Project Gutenberg
• The Good Soldier complete
• LitWeb.net: Ford Madox Ford Biography
• International Ford Madox Ford Studies
• The Ford Madox Ford Papers at Washington University in St. Louis

Persondata
NAME	Ford, Ford Madox
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Hueffer, Ford Madox; Hueffer, Ford Hermann
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English novelist, publisher
DATE OF BIRTH	December 17, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH	Merton, Surrey
DATE OF DEATH	June 26, 1939
PLACE OF DEATH	Deauville, France

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