Abstract

In The Last Pre-Raphaelite, Douglas Goldring's biography of Ford Madox Ford, Hunt is given credit for exerting a beneficial influence on Ford's development as a novelist. Violet was an experienced as well as an accomplished novelist, writes Goldring, her best books had a quality of smouldering passion and depth of feeling which were absent from Ford's novels before The Good Soldier.' Goldring goes on to mention Violet's story that she salvaged the manuscript of The Good Soldier which Ford in a fit of depression had consigned to the dustbin.2 This story of hers lacks confirmation, but it is not easy to dismiss Hunt's claim, in I Have this to Say, that much in The Good Soldier has a very personal origin; indeed, most critics have readily granted the extraordinary degree to which subjective elements are present in Ford's novels, in The Good Soldier and in Parade's End, no less than in the early, minor works.3 Here I propose to examine The Desirable Alien at Home in Germany, a travel book published in 1913 and written principally by Hunt but with at least two complete chapters and a number of footnotes contributed by Ford. No one has yet called attention to the extent to which some passages of this book anticipate certain themes and even specific passages of The Good Soldier. Since the question of attribution of passages is central to this discussion, it is necessary to make clear at once what is known of the origin of The Desirable Alien and to designate the contributions of Hunt and of Ford himself as accur-

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