It Was the Nightingale

By Ford Madox Ford

Ford describes his encounters with Conrad, Hemingway, Proust, and Joyce, among other writers, with an infectious energy that animates every page of this compelling memoir. This comprehensive new edition seeks to redress the fact that his autobiographical writing remains largely unrecognized. Through this volume, his literary life is made available for the first time since 1984. Written with the generosity, punch, and flair that characterize Ford's novels, it employs a subtle and flexible rhetoric of narrative that fuses the genres of fiction and memoir. Ultimately, however, it tells a story of rebirth, in which the process of literary creation becomes an affirmation of life itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
• Release date: Oct 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781847776969

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.