Critical Essays

By Ford Madox Ford

In 1911 some of D.H. Lawrence's poems and his story Odour of Chrysanthemums found their way, without his knowledge, to the desk of the editor of the English Review, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford). Ford was astonished and invited Lawrence to meet him, which the poet did with superb reluctance. Ford reinvents the meeting in 1937, recalling how, 'He had come, like the fox, with his overflood of energy - his abounding vitality of passionate determination that seemed always too big for his frail body.' Ford included the work in the English Review, talked up the new writer, and handed on his first novel, The White Peacock, to Messrs Heinemann. It is hard to understate the impact that Ford had on the literature of his age. His work as a magazine editor alone ensures him a place in the annals of Modernism; his patronage, his successful as much as his squandered aid - to Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Hudson, Pound, Conrad, Joyce, Stein, early Hemingway, Cummings, Rhys and others remembered and forgotten - is a huge chapter of literary history. As well as being an enabler, he was also a great critic, with the ability to read the present and re-read the past with independent vision. Series Editor: Bill Hutchings

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lives and Letters
• Release date: Oct 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781847776921

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.