Women and Men

By Ford Madox Ford

This early work by Ford Madox Ford was originally published in 1923 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in his family - Hueffer's grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was a well-known painter, and his German émigré father was music critic of The Times - and after a brief dalliance with music composition, the young Hueffer began to write. Although Hueffer never attended university, during his early twenties he moved through many intellectual circles, and would later talk of the influence that the "Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great" - men such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle - exerted on him. In 1908, Hueffer founded the English Review, and over the next 15 months published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats, and gave débuts to many authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Hueffer's editorship consolidated the classic canon of early modernist literature, and saw him earn a reputation as of one of the century's greatest literary editors. Ford's most famous work was his Parade's End tetralogy, which he completed in the 1920's and have now been adapted into a BBC television drama. Ford continued to write through the thirties, producing fiction, non-fiction, and two volumes of autobiography: Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933). In his last years, he taught literature at the Olivet College in Michigan. Ford died on 26th June 1939 in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473359116

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.

Book preview

Women and Men

I.Honour

THE other day an author of some position came to me in a state of great anger. He had been asked by a woman writer to compose a preface for her volume of short stories that was newly to appear. My friend H had written the preface. He had dilated on the fact that publishers said the short story in volume form did not sell. He had gone on to say that probably the publishers were right. But that was because short stories in England are simply not good enough, and he adduced the fact that when short stories were really first rate they sold in quantities really enormous. He instanced Messrs. A, B, and C—all authors of short stories with huge publics; then he went on to talk of the stories by the lady herself. He told me that he had made a good job of his preface and I dare say he had. The epilogue came when the publishers of the volume flatly refused to print the preface. They said that no honourable publisher would publish a word against any other publisher but they flatly refused to print in a volume published by them any flattering reference to any author not published by them. The authors A B and C whom my friend H had mentioned with admiration were all published, that is to say, by other firms.

My friend H was exceedingly infuriated. He said that it was an outrage to ask anybody to write a preface for nothing and then to cavil at its contents. He said that if publishers were to refuse to publish any comments on the habits of publishers they would thus be establishing a censorship which was utterly against all decency; under the cloak of it they would be able of course to commit any outrage. And, if all publishers were going to set up the pretention that in a book published by them no work by any author appearing through another publisher could ever be praised, there would be an end of criticism since criticism only exists by means of comparison. And Mr. H’s fury became enormous when he spoke of the authoress. He said that this was what came of having to do with women. He said that no woman had any principles whatever.

The trouble was that Miss W—the woman writer in question—had not been really excessively pleased with my friend H’s preface. She had expected him to devote the whole of that piece of writing to her own merits. She had wanted enormities of praise. Now my friend H happened to be a particularly intimate friend of Miss W. He said that one cannot apply butter with a trowel to the works of one’s intimates. It was not the thing to do; it was not honorable; it was not even polite. Miss W on the other hand wanted to know what a friend was for if he could not praise one’s books.

Miss W put up no sort of fight against the publisher. She just let Mr. H’s preface drop. It seemed to her that it was reasonable that publishers should refuse to allow other publishers to be commented on. She even said that that was why men got on better than women. They stuck together and realised that dog does not eat dog. And she was quite on the side of the publishers in their refusing to have anything to do with praising other publishers’ authors. She said that that was business common sense and that that again was why men got on better than women. They knew the ropes better and she got in a nasty shot by asking why it was that my friend H got prices three times better for his books while she had a public twice as large.

At this point of his tale my friend H swore violently. He said again that this was what came of having to do with women. Miss W, he said, if she had been a man would have withdrawn her book unconditionally from the publishers. She would not have permitted him to be insulted. She would have taken her stand on the broad eminence of principles, honour and etiquette. But women, my friend H observed, had no sense of honour, of rectitude, or even of decency. Moreover, he continued, every woman was entirely wanting in the sense of what is honourable in men. Almost every woman was under the influence of some shocking bad hat or other. Miss W was an instance in point. She got such low prices for her books because she was entirely under the thumb of X. X was the managing director of the publishers in question.

My friend H went on to say that he was perfectly convinced that X was a shocking bad hat and with his firm was absolutely dishonest. He had told Miss W this; he had told her innumerable times. He had begged her to take her books away from the firm which X administered. What X was up to now was no more nor less than trying to breed a quarrel between himself and Miss W. X had always hated to think that H should have any influence with Miss W at all. Miss W on the other hand was always in X’s office and X was always pitching her some tale or other to prove that her books did not sell. That was X’s way of doing business. He got hold of a lot of women and had them there to tea every day and all day long. And then he told them that their books did not sell and got them on the cheap. And Mr. H said that Mr. X had always hated himself because X had once tried to swindle him and had of course failed utterly. Now X had got the chance to kick him in the face and by Jove! he had taken it.

And the damnably irritating thing about it all, Mr. H concluded vindictively, "as it’s the damnably irritating thing about all women, is that Miss W is by now convinced that the fellow X is a swindler. But how?—I have been trying to make her believe it for