F ord, F ord M adox

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford is known, in the main, for his two acknowledged masterpieces, The Good Soldier and the four novels that, together, make up Parade's End: Some Do Not …, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up – , and Last Post. The Good Soldier is counted among the classics of modernism. Rebecca West cited the “wonders of its technique” in her contemporary review. Students of the period read the novel at first for these wonders, contending with its quintessentially unreliable narrator, John Dowell, as well as his tale of social disintegration, sexual intrigue, and violent death. Anthony Burgess called Parade's End “the finest novel about the First World War.” Its perfectly weighted opening sentence introduces a text that is now familiar to many. Ford's oeuvre includes a further nearly 80 books, however, and spans a great range of genres. Born in 1873, Ford was first published in 1891. He wrote fiction, fairy tales, poetry, and biography at the start of his career, caught and inspired by an extraordinary combination of late nineteenth‐century influences. Most notably, this early work revealed a dedicated attention to his Pre‐Raphaelite beginnings; Ford's grandfather Ford Madox Brown illustrated his first publication, a fairy tale called The Brown Owl (1891), and Edward Burne‐Jones the later The Queen Who Flew (1894).