Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was a British author and literary figure born on December 17, 1873, as Ford Hermann Hueffer. He was the eldest of three children in a family steeped in artistic and literary traditions, being the grandson of Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown. Ford’s literary career began with his debut fairy story, "The Brown Owl," in 1891, and he later became known for his collaborations with Joseph Conrad, producing notable works such as "The Inheritors" and "Romance."
Throughout his life, Ford experienced significant personal and professional challenges, including a breakdown around his thirtieth birthday and the strains of World War I, which ultimately influenced his writing. He is perhaps best known for his novel "The Good Soldier," which delves into themes of psychological and moral complexity. Ford's later years were marked by a rich involvement in the literary community, particularly in Paris, where he became a key figure among expatriates.
His legacy includes a substantial body of work across various genres, as well as an exaggerated public persona shaped by his autobiographies. Ford continued to write until his death from heart failure in June 1939, leaving behind a diverse and impactful literary heritage.
Ford Madox Ford
English novelist, poet, critic, editor, and biographer.
- Born: December 17, 1873
- Place of birth: Merton, England
- Died: June 26, 1939
- Place of death: Deauville, France
Biography
Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer on December 17, 1873. He was the oldest of three children, with a younger brother named Oliver and a younger sister named Juliet. His father was Franz Xaver Hueffer, a music critic of German origin, and his mother was Catherine Ernely Madox Brown, the daughter of the pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown. Ford was a privileged child who grew up in a home where he was exposed early to artistic and literary influences. He received his formal schooling at Praetoria House and University College School in London. When his father died in 1889, he and Oliver went to live with their grandfather, while Juliet went to live with an aunt. At the age of eighteen Ford traveled on the Continent and became a Roman Catholic to please his rich German relatives.
The Brown Owl, a fairy story, marked Ford’s print debut in 1891. In 1894 he married Elsie Martindale, his girlfriend from school, and the couple moved to Bonnington, Kent, where Ford devoted himself to writing. During this time they had two daughters: Christina, born in 1897, and Katharine, born in 1900. In 1898 Ford met Joseph Conrad and discovered that they shared a fundamental agreement on the role of technique in the novel. For the next decade or so the two fledgling authors collaborated in a partnership and produced three novels: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of a Crime (1909), the latter of which was serialized first and was only published in book form in 1924.
Between 1892 and 1902 Ford published nine volumes of biography, fiction, poetry, and travel. Around the time of his thirtieth birthday, the strain of such productivity resulted in an agoraphobic breakdown. Despite his illness, he worked on a fictional treatment of Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII; this eventually became the clever trilogy The Fifth Queen (1906), Privy Seal (1907), and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908). The reception of his nonfiction work The Soul of London, published in 1905, gave his recovery a physical and financial boost. This success was followed by the high point of his public career in England, the editorship of the English Review during 1908–9.
The financial failure of this brilliant journal and a crisis in his personal life brought Ford's short glory to an end. His unsuccessful attempt to arrange a divorce from his wife further alienated his former friends, and he moved in with author and popular literary host Violet Hunt, with whom he collaborated on two nonfiction works, The Desirable Alien (1913) and Zeppelin Nights (1915), before their relationship ended. Ford's personal turmoil seemed to prompt some of his better writing, and two novels of this period fared well. Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911) offers Ford’s satirical analysis of medieval England; The Good Soldier (1915), a story of psychological, religious, and moral violence between the sexes, reflects his own painful marital situation at the time.
World War I provided Ford with an escape from his personal difficulties. By the time he emerged from it in 1919, a victim of shell shock and gassing, the Imagist movement had felt the impact of his poetry collection On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service (1918). For a few years he lived in modest agrarian style in Sussex with an artist, Stella Bowen. He changed his last name from Hueffer to Ford, ostensibly to avoid the anti-Prussian sentiment that pervaded England, and he and Bowen had a daughter, Esther Julia Madox Ford, in 1920.
Ford's semi-absence from the literary scene ended in 1922 when he went to Paris and became editor of the Trans-Atlantic Review, a short-lived periodical whose contributors included Ezra Pound and James Joyce. In France, where his reputation was solid as a result of his perceptive book on the French nation, Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915), Ford was a patriarch to the bohemian, expatriate circle. In England, however, antagonism toward him increased after he published Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance in October 1924, just two months after Conrad’s death, due to his perceived exaggeration of his influence on Conrad’s works.
Also published in 1924 was Some Do Not . . . , the first of four novels dealing with Christopher Tietjens, an extraordinary character of twentieth-century fiction who personifies the Tory, Christian gentlemen of immense intellect and humanity living in a hostile, crumbling world. In the three successive books—No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928)—Ford achieved his finest technique, making intricate use of the timeshift and incorporating some farsighted ideas about the individual, society, war, politics, and religion. Ford and Bowen separated in 1928, and two years later Ford met American artist Janice Biala, with whom he would remain until his death.
Over the course of sixty-five years Ford established what was to become a legendary personality, which he further exaggerated by his own sensational autobiographies, Return to Yesterday (1931) and It Was the Nightingale (1933). In 1937 he became the writer and critic in residence at Olivet College in Michigan. While there, he finished his last published work: The March of Literature (1938), a massively sweeping overview of the subject that covers, as the subtitle indicates, the period "from Confucius’ day to our own." Due to ill health, Ford decided to spend the summer of 1939 in southern France, and in June of that year he died of heart failure in Deauville, France.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
The Shifting of the Fire, 1892
The Inheritors, 1901 (with Joseph Conrad)
Romance, 1903 (with Joseph Conrad)
The Benefactor, 1905
The Fifth Queen, 1906
Privy Seal, 1907
An English Girl, 1907
The Fifth Queen Crowned, 1908
Mr. Apollo, 1908
The ‘Half Moon’: A Romance of the Old World and the New, 1909
The Nature of a Crime, 1909 (serial), 1924 (book; with Conrad)
A Call, 1910
The Portrait, 1910
The Simple Life Limited, 1911
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, 1911
The Panel, 1912 (published in the US as Ring for Nancy, 1913)
The New Humpty-Dumpty, 1912
Mr. Fleight, 1913
The Young Lovell, 1913
The Good Soldier, 1915
The Marsden Case, 1923
Some Do Not . . . , 1924
No More Parades, 1925
A Man Could Stand Up, 1926
Last Post, 1928
A Little Less Than Gods, 1928
No Enemy, 1929
When the Wicked Man, 1931 (dated 1932)
The Rash Act, 1933
Henry for Hugh, 1934
Vive le Roy, 1936
Parade’s End, 1950 (includes Some Do Not . . . , No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post)
Poetry:
The Questions at the Well, 1893 (as Fenil Haig)
Poems for Pictures, 1900
The Face of the Night, 1904
From Inland, and Other Poems, 1907
Songs from London, 1910
High Germany: Eleven Sets of Verse, 1911
Collected Poems, 1913 (dated 1914)
Antwerp, 1915
On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service, 1918
A House, 1921
New Poems, 1927
Collected Poems, 1936
Nonfiction:
Ford Madox Brown, 1896
The Cinque Ports, 1900
Rossetti, 1902
The Soul of London, 1905
Hans Holbein, the Younger, 1905
The Heart of the Country, 1906
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1907
The Spirit of the People, 1907
Ancient Lights, 1911 (published in the US as Memories and Impressions, 1911)
The Critical Attitude, 1911
The Desirable Alien at Home in Germany, 1913 (with Violet Hunt)
Henry James, 1913
This Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1913 (pamphlet)
When Blood Is Their Argument, 1915
Between St. Dennis and St. George, 1915
Zeppelin Nights: A London Entertainment, 1915 (dated 1916; with Violet Hunt)
Thus to Revisit, 1921
Women and Men, 1923
Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 1924
A Mirror to France, 1926
New York Is Not America, 1927
New York Essays, 1927
The English Novel, 1929
No Enemy, 1929
Return to Yesterday, 1931 (autobiography)
It Was the Nightingale, 1933 (autobiography)
Provence, 1935
Great Trade Route, 1937
Portraits from Life, 1937 (published in the UK as Mightier Than the Sword, 1938)
The March of Literature: From Confucius’ Day to Our Own, 1938
The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, 1993
A Literary Friendship: Correspondence Between Caroline Gordon and Ford Madox Ford, 1999
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
The Brown Owl, 1891 (dated 1892)
The Feather, 1892
The Queen Who Flew, 1894
Christina’s Fairy Book, 1906
Mister Bosphorus and the Muses, 1923
Bibliography
Bender, Todd K. Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë. Garland Publishing, 1997. Examines style and technique in the four authors. Includes bibliographical references and an index.
Cassell, Richard A., editor. Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford. G. K. Hall, 1987. In his introduction, Cassell reviews Ford criticism, which he believes became more laudatory and perceptive after 1939. Though there are essays dealing with Ford’s romances, poetry, and social criticism, the bulk of the book focuses on The Good Soldier and Parade’s End.
Cassell, Richard A., editor. Ford Madox Ford: A Study of His Novels. 1961. Greenwood Press, 1977. Includes chapters on biography, aesthetics, and literary theory, followed by close readings not only of the major works (The Good Soldier, Parade’s End) but also of neglected minor fictional works, particularly Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, The Rash Act, and Henry for Hugh.
Green, Robert. Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics. Cambridge UP, 1981. Unlike earlier studies that applied New Criticism to Ford’s work, places Ford within his historical context and identifies his political beliefs. Chronological bibliography of his work as well as an extensive yet selected bibliography of Ford criticism.
Huntley, H. Robert. The Alien Protagonist of Ford Madox Ford. U of North Carolina P, 1970. Focuses on the typical Ford protagonist, a man whose alien temperament and ethics produce a conflict with his society.
Judd, Alan. Ford Madox Ford. 1990. Harvard UP, 1991. A very readable, shrewd biography. Includes no source notes and only a brief bibliographical note.
MacShane, Frank, editor. Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. An invaluable collection of reviews and responses, gleaned from literary journals, to Ford’s fiction and poetry. Includes an 1892 unsigned review of The Shifting of the Fire, as well as essays by such literary greats as Theodore Dreiser, Arnold Bennett, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Christina Rossetti, H. L. Mencken, Graham Greene, and Robert Lowell. There are reviews of individual novels, essays on controversies in which Ford was embroiled, and general studies of Ford’s art.