Parade's End: Pt. 1: Some Do Not ... A Novel

Description

For the first time, the four novels that make up Ford Madox Ford's First World War masterpiece Parade's End are published in fully annotated editions, with authoritative corrected texts. Each edition is edited by a leading Ford expert. Some Do Not ...includes * the first reliable text, based on the manuscript and first editions * a major critical introduction by Max Saunders, Ford's acclaimed biographer * an account of the novel's composition and reception * a reconstruction of Ford's dramatic original ending, published complete for the first time * annotations explaining historical references, military terms, literary and topical allusions * a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions * a bibliography of further reading Some Do Not ..., the first volume of Parade's End, introduces the central characters: Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant, unconventional mathematician; his dazzling but unfaithful wife Sylvia; and the young Suffragette Valentine Wannop. It starts with the cataclysmic meeting of Tietjens and Valentine: a weekend whose violence prefigures the coming war. It ends in 1917 as the two are on the verge of becoming lovers, before Tietjens prepares to return to the Front and probable death. Some Do Not ...is an unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society facing catastrophe, as the energies of sexuality and power erupt in madness and violence.

Ford Madox Ford was an editor, an essayist, a critic, an advocate, and a novelist. He is the author of The Good Soldier, Parade's End, and The Rash Act, and the coauthor, with Joseph Conrad, of The Inheritors and Romance. Max Saunders is a professor of English and the codirector of the Center for Life-Writing Research at King's College London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature and the editor of Ford's Selected Poems and War Prose.

"[Ford] was the only Englishman who stood alongside the great 'moderns': Joyce, Eliot, and Pound." --Peter Ackroyd, novelist, "The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling"