The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad

Description

Of all Ford Madox Ford's critical works, The English Novel (first published in 1930) is his most satisfying. He wrote it while travelling: memory plays a large part. It does not smell of the lamp or the library. Our guide-a major innovative novelist of the century-takes us on a tour of the key literary form of the age, from its birth to his own time. Ford understands the novel, its development and potential. His radical view of nineteenth-century fiction and his advocacy of Flaubert and Conrad are persuasive. His association with Conrad makes the passages on the author of Nostromo (to which he contributed) especially compelling. We are offered `suggestions not dictates'. Ford espouses no orthodoxy: he urges a fresh reading of the best work in our tradition, with pointers in unexpected directions. Seventy years after it was written, The English Novel remains compulsively readable. A definite critic in his sure understanding of technique, Ford's taste and his perception of directions in literature are vivid and suggestive. The volume is part of The Millennium Ford which aims to bring all the major works of this writer back into circulation.

FORD MADOX FORD (1873-1939), one of the shaping spirits of modern literature, was a great editor, essayist, critic, advocate, and above all a great novelist. The Good Soldier and the Tietjens trilogy are acknowledged masterpieces. The Rash Act has been hailed as a major addition to the Ford canon. Of his novels Carcanet publish The Good Soldier, Parade's End, The Rash Act and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. Carcanet also publish The English Novel, The Ford Madox Ford Reader, A History of Our Own Time and Selected Poems, War Prose, Return to Yesterday and other titles. Some of these have been released as part of The Millennium Ford that will bring all his major work back into circulation. Ford Hermann Hueffer (he adopted the name Ford Madox Ford in 1919) was born in Surrey in 1873. His father was an author and musicologist and his mother was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. He quickly took to writing : at seventeen he'd written a children's story, in 1892 his first novel was released. Following the death of Ford Madox Brown, he wrote his grandfather's biography. He was an experienced writer when he met Joseph Conrad and they began a literary relationship which proved highly fruitful for the development of both writer's conception of the novelist's task. They collaborated on The Inheritors(1901) and other books. Ford continued to write prolifically on his own account in a variety of forms: art criticism, poetry, essays and novels. He wrote the book The Good Soldier which was published in 1915, the same year he took a commission in the army. His experience furnished him with material for Parade's End. His critical study The English Novel was published in 1929. He continued to publish novels regularly, as well as other works, notably an extended Collected Poems in 1936. He died in Deauville, France in 1939.