Ford Madox Ford

Ford was born in Merton in Surrey{{cite book|title=Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=s24bAgAAQBAJ&q=ford+madox+ford+kingston+road&pg=PT9|isbn=9781908909701|access-date=3 February 2014|last1=Ford|first1=Ford Madox|date=17 November 2013| publisher=Delphi Classics }} to Catherine Madox Brown and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer and his sister was Juliet Hueffer, the wife of David Soskice and mother of Frank Soskice. Ford's father, who became a music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was the first to publish the Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. He was named after his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he would eventually write. His mother's older half-sister was Lucy Madox Brown, the wife of William Michael Rossetti and mother of Olivia Rossetti Agresti.

In 1889, after the death of their father, Ford and Oliver went to live with their grandfather in London. Ford attended the University College School in London, but never studied at university.{{cite web|last1=Saunders|first1=Max|title=Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939): Biography|url=http://www.fordmadoxford.org/fords-biography.html |publisher=The Ford Madox Society|access-date=31 May 2015}} In November 1892, at 18, he became a Catholic, "very much at the encouragement of some Hueffer relatives, but partly (he confessed) galled by the 'militant atheism and anarchism' of his English cousins."Janet Soskice, "I have never felt so at home." The Tablet, 8 September 2012, 15. Ford was a great uncle of Soskice's husband.

In 1894, Ford eloped with his school girlfriend Elsie Martindale. The couple were married in Gloucester and moved to Bonnington in Kent. In 1901, they moved to Winchelsea. They had two daughters, Christina (born 1897) and Katharine (born 1900).{{cite web|url=http://www.fordmadoxford.org/fords-biography.html |title=Biography |date=19 February 2025 |publisher=Ford Madox Ford Society}} Ford's neighbours in Winchelsea included the authors Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, W. H. Hudson, Henry James in nearby Rye, and H. G. Wells.

In 1904, Ford suffered an agoraphobic breakdown due to financial and marital problems. He went to Germany to spend time with family there and undergo treatments.

In 1909, Ford left his wife and set up home with English writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he published the literary magazine The English Review. Ford's wife refused to divorce him and he attempted to become a German citizen to obtain a divorce in Germany. This was unsuccessful. A reference in an illustrated paper to Violet Hunt as "Mrs. Ford Madox Hueffer" gave rise to a successful libel action being brought by Mrs. Elsie Hueffer in 1913. Ford's relationship with Hunt did not survive the First World War.South Lodge by Douglas Goldring, Constable and Co, 1943)

Ford used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer, but changed it to Ford Madox Ford after World War I in 1919, partly to fulfil the terms of a small legacy,{{cite book|last1=Stang |first1=Sondra |title=The Ford Madox Ford Reader |date=1986 |publisher=Carcanet |location=Manchester |isbn=0-85635-519-4 |page=481}} partly "because a Teutonic name is in these days disagreeable", and possibly to avoid further lawsuits from Elsie in the event of his new companion being referred to as "Mrs. Hueffer".{{cite book |last1=Judd |first1=Alan |title=Ford Madox Ford |date=1991 |publisher=Flamingo |location=London |isbn=0-00-654448-7 |page=324}}

Between 1918 and 1927, he lived with Stella Bowen, an Australian artist 20 years his junior. In 1920, Ford and Bowen had a daughter, Julia Madox Ford.{{cite book|title=The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford | url=https://archive.org/details/saddeststorybiog0000mize |url-access=registration |place=New York |first=Arthur |last=Mizener |publisher=World Publishing |year=1971}}

In the summer of 1927, The New York Times reported that Ford had converted a mill building in Avignon, France into a home and workshop that he called "Le Vieux Moulin". The article implied that Ford was reunited with his wife at this point.{{cite news |last1=Birkhead |first1=May |author-link=May Birkhead |date=14 August 1927 |title=Americans in Paris Find Book Material; Burton Holmes Obtains Unique Pictures -- Maddox Ford Writes in an Old Mill. Deauville Season Starts Fine Weather Draws Notables to Coast Resort for the Racing and Polo |url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9805E4DB103FE03ABC4C52DFBE66838C639EDE |access-date=31 May 2015 |work=The New York Times}}

In the early 1930s, Ford established a relationship with Janice Biala, a Polish-born artist from New York, who illustrated several of Ford's later books.South Lodge by Douglas Goldring, Constable & Co, 1943) This relationship lasted until the late 1930s.

Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, US. Olivet president, Joseph Brewer, admired Ford’s literary stature and wanted him to contribute to the college’s cultural mission. Ford’s acceptance was driven by his need for financial stability and his desire to mentor young writers.Max Saunders.Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (Oxford University Press, 1996): 505-510. Robie Macauley who wrote the 1950 introduction to Ford's Parade’s End includes his reflections on Ford at Olivet.Ford, Ford Madox. 1950. Parade’s End. With an Introd. By Robie Macauley. [1st Borzoi ed.]. New York: Knopf.

He was taken ill in Honfleur, France, in June 1939 and died shortly afterward in Deauville at the age of 65.

File:Ford Madox Ford 80 Campden Hill Road blue plaque.jpg, Kensington, London]]

One of Ford's most famous works is the novel The Good Soldier (1915). Set just before World War I, The Good Soldier chronicles the tragic expatriate lives of two "perfect couples", one British and one American, using intricate flashbacks. In the "Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford" that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier "the finest French novel in the English language!" Ford pronounced himself a "Tory mad about historic continuity" and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time.{{cite journal|jstor=441444|title=The Tory in a Time of Change: Social Aspects of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End|first=Gene M.|last=Moore|date=23 December 1982|journal=Twentieth Century Literature|volume=28|issue=1|pages=49–68|doi=10.2307/441444}} However, he was dismissive of the Conservative Party, referring to it as "the Stupid Party."{{cite book |last1=Ford |first1=Ford Madox |title=Memories and Impressions: A Study in Atmospheres |url=https://archive.org/details/memoriesimpressi00ford |date=1911 |publisher=Harper & Brothers |page=[https://archive.org/details/memoriesimpressi00ford/page/193 193]}}

Ford was involved in British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, along with Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman; When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915).

After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welsh Regiment of the British Army on 30 July 1915. He was sent to France. Ford's combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I.

File:FifthQueen-cvr archive-org (PD).jpg (1906) by Ford Madox Ford, then known as Ford Madox Hueffer]]

Ford wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, although written much earlier). During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908), historical novels based on the life of Katharine Howard,{{cite book |last=Ford |first=Ford Madox |url=https://archive.org/details/fifthqueenfift00ford/mode/2up?view=theater |title=The Fifth Queen |publisher=The Vanguard Press |year=1963 |location=New York |pages=[https://archive.org/details/fifthqueenfift00ford/page/n1/mode/2up?view=theater From the description on the dust jacket] by Graham Greene et seq. |url-access=registration}} which Conrad termed, at the time, "the swan song of historical romance."{{cite book

| last = Judd

| first = Alan

| title = Ford Madox Ford

| url = https://archive.org/details/fordmadoxford00judd

| url-access = registration

| publisher = Harvard University Press

| location = Cambridge, MA

| year = 1991

| page = [https://archive.org/details/fordmadoxford00judd/page/157 157]| isbn = 9780674308152

}}

Ford's poem "Antwerp" (1915) was praised by T. S. Eliot as "the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war".{{cite web |url=http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Antwerp |title=Antwerp |first=Pericles |last=Lewis |access-date=12 March 2013 |archive-date=23 June 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170623082107/http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Antwerp |url-status=dead }}

Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised in 1935){{cite journal| first= Richard A. | last= Cassell| title= The Two Sorrells of Ford Madox Ford| journal= Modern Philology| volume= 59| number= 2| date= November 1961| pages= 114–121 | doi= 10.1086/389447| jstor= 434869| s2cid= 154530201}} is a time travel novel, like Twain's classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, only dramatising the difficulties, not the rewards, of such idealised situations.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ford took the side of the left Republican faction, declaring: "I am unhesitatingly for the existing Spanish Government and against Franco's attempt—on every ground of feeling and reason ... Mr Franco wishes to establish a government resting on the arms of Moors, Germans, Italians. Its success must be contrary to world conscience."{{cite book |last1=Saunders |first1=Max |title=Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life: Volume II: The After-War World |date=2012 |publisher=Oxford University Press |pages=627–628}} His opinion of Mussolini and Hitler was likewise negative, and he offered to sign a manifesto against Nazism.

In 1908, Ford founded The English Review. Ford published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, May Sinclair, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats; and debuted works of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets in London in the teens particularly valued Ford's poetry as exemplifying treatment of modern subjects in contemporary diction. In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Ford befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound{{cite book| editor-last= Lindberg-Seyersted| editor-first= Brita| title= Pound/Ford, the story of a literary friendship: the correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and their writings about each other| first1= Ezra| last1= Pound| first2= Ford Madox| last2= Ford| first3= Brita| last3= Lindberg-Seyersted| publisher= New Directions Publishing| year= 1982| isbn= 978-0-8112-0833-8| url= https://archive.org/details/poundfordstoryof00poun}} and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford was the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises{{cite book| page= 84| title= Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art| first= Richard| last= Wald| publisher= University of California Press| year= 1964}}). Basil Bunting worked as Ford's assistant on the magazine.

As a critic, Ford is known for remarking "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." George Seldes, in his book Witness to a Century, describes Ford ("probably in 1932") recalling his writing collaboration with Joseph Conrad, and the lack of acknowledgment by publishers of his status as co-author. Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: "'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes." Ford says, "I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway." Seldes observes, "At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry."{{cite book |last=Seldes |first=George |date=1987 |title=Witness to a Century |url=https://archive.org/details/witnesstocentury00seld/page/258 |location=New York |publisher=Ballantine Books |pages=[https://archive.org/details/witnesstocentury00seld/page/258 258–259] |isbn=0345331818 }}

Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a café in Paris during the early 1920s. He describes Ford "as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead."{{cite book| first= Ernest| last= Hemingway | title= A Moveable Feast}}

During a later sojourn in the United States, Ford was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student).{{cite journal|last1=Honaker|first1=Lisa|title=Caroline Gordon: A Biography, and: Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love (review)|journal=Modern Fiction Studies|date=Summer 1990|volume=36|issue=2|pages=240–42|doi=10.1353/mfs.0.0714|s2cid=161254508}} Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. In 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously,{{cite web |url=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rhys.htm |title=Jean Rhys |website=Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi) |first=Petri |last=Liukkonen |publisher=Kuusankoski Public Library |location=Finland |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080615145356/http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rhys.htm |archive-date=15 June 2008 |url-status=dead }} which Rhys fictionalised in her novel Quartet.

Ford is best remembered for his novels The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–1928) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels,{{cite web| url= http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html | work= Modern Library| title= 100 Best Novels| publisher= Random House| date= 20 July 1998}} The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time",{{cite web|url=http://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+Observer's+100+Greatest+Novels+of+All+Time|title=The Observer's 100 Greatest Novels of All Time - Book awards |website=Librarything.com|access-date=23 December 2017}} and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read".{{cite news| url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction/print| work= The Guardian| title= 1000 novels everyone must read| date= 23 January 2009}} The Parade's End tetralogy was made into an acclaimed BBC/HBO 5 part TV series in 2012, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and scripted by Tom Stoppard.{{cite web|url= https://fordmadoxford.org/parades-end|title= Parade's End BBC Adaptation |date= 19 February 2025 |publisher=Ford Madox Ford Society}}

Anthony Burgess described Ford as the "greatest British novelist" of the 20th century.{{cite book|author=Anthony Burgess|title=You've Had Your Time|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9AvZAgAAQBAJ|date=3 April 2014|publisher=Random House|isbn=978-1-4735-1239-9|page=130}} Graham Greene was also a great admirer, and more recently Julian Barnes who has written essays about Ford and his work. Professor Max Saunders is the author of an authoritative biography of Ford, published in two volumes by Oxford University Press in 1996, followed up by a single volume focusing on two of Ford's novels, The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–1928), in 2023. Saunders has also edited some of Ford's oeuvre reissued by the Carcanet Press.

{{Div col}}

• The Shifting of the Fire, as H. Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
• The Questions at the Well as Fenil Haig,1893
• The Brown Owl, as H. Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
• The Queen Who Flew: A Fairy Tale, Bliss Sands & Foster, 1894.
• Ford Madox Brown : a record of his life and work, as H. Ford Hueffer, Longmans, Green, 1896.
• The Cinque Ports, Blackwood, 1900.
• The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Heinemann, 1901.
• Rossetti, Duckworth, [1902].
• Romance, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Smith Elder, 1903.
• The Benefactor, Langham, 1905.
• The Soul of London: A Survey of the Modern City, Alston Rivers, 1905.
• The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land, Alston Rivers, 1906.
• The Fifth Queen (Part One of The Fifth Queen trilogy), Alston Rivers, 1906.
• Privy Seal (Part Two of The Fifth Queen trilogy), Alston Rivers, 1907.
• The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind, Alston Rivers, 1907.
• An English Girl, Methuen, 1907.
• The Fifth Queen Crowned (Part Three of The Fifth Queen trilogy), Nash, 1908.
• Mr Apollo, Methuen, 1908.
• The Half Moon, Nash, 1909.
• A Call, Chatto, 1910.
• The Portrait, Methuen, 1910.
• The Critical Attitude, as Ford Madox Hueffer, Duckworth 1911.
• The Simple Life Limited, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1911.
• Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Constable, 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
• The Panel: A Sheer Comedy, Constable, 1912 (published in the U.S. as Ring for Nancy: A Sheer Comedy).
• The New Humpty Dumpty, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1912.
• Henry James, Secker, 1913.
• Mr Fleight, Latimer, 1913.
• The Young Lovell, Chatto, 1913.
• Antwerp (eight-page poem), The Poetry Bookshop, 1915.
• Henry James, A Critical Study (1915).
• Between St. Dennis and St. George, Hodder, 1915.
• The Good Soldier, Lane, 1915.
• Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt, Lane, 1915.
• The Marsden Case, Duckworth, 1923.
• Women and Men, Paris, 1923.
• Mr Bosphorous, Duckworth, 1923.
• The Nature of a Crime, with Joseph Conrad, Duckworth, 1924.
• Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance, Little, Brown and Company, 1924.
• Some Do Not . . ., (First in Parade's End tetralogy) Duckworth, 1924.
• No More Parades, Duckworth, 1925.
• A Man Could Stand Up --, Duckworth, 1926.
• '' A Mirror To France. Duckworth. 1926
• New York is Not America, Duckworth, 1927.
• New York Essays, Rudge, 1927.
• New Poems, Rudge, 1927.
• Last Post, (Fourth in Parade's End tetralogy) Duckworth, 1928.
• A Little Less Than Gods, Duckworth, [1928].
• No Enemy, Macaulay, 1929.
• The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (One Hour Series), Lippincott, 1929; Constable, 1930.
• Return to Yesterday, Liveright, 1932.
• When the Wicked Man, Cape, 1932.
• The Rash Act, Cape, 1933.
• It Was the Nightingale, Lippincott, 1933.
• Henry for Hugh, Lippincott, 1934.
• Provence, Unwin, 1935.
• Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (revised version), 1935
• Portraits from Life: Memories and Criticism of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Ivan Turgenev, W. H. Hudson, Theodore Dreiser, A. C. Swinburne, Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, 1937.
• Great Trade Route, OUP, 1937.
• Vive Le Roy, Unwin, 1937.
• The March of Literature, Dial, 1938.
• Selected Poems, Randall, 1971.
• Your Mirror to My Times, Holt, 1971.
• A History of Our Own Times, Indiana University Press, 1988.

{{Div col end}}

{{Reflist}}

• Attridge, John, "Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology," in Modernism/modernity 15:2 ([http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/toc/mod15.2.html] April 2008), 297–315.
• {{Cite book | author=Carpenter, Humphrey| year=1987| title=Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s| publisher=Unwin Hyman| isbn=0-04-440331-3}} Contains a sharp, critical biographical sketch of Ford.
• {{cite book|last1=Davison-Pégon|first1=Claire|last2=Lemarchal|first2=Dominique|title=Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence|date=2011|publisher=Rodopi|location=Amsterdam|isbn=9789401200462|oclc=734015160}}
• Goldring, Douglas, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: A Record of the Life and Writings of Ford Madox Ford. Macdonald & Co., 1948
• Hawkes, Rob, Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. {{ISBN|978-0230301535}}
• Judd, Alan, Ford Madox Ford. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
• MacShane, Frank (ed.), Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972
• Mizener, Arthur, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford. World Publishing Co., 1971
• Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. {{ISBN|0-19-211789-0}} and {{ISBN|0-19-212608-3}}
• Thirlwell, Angela, Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown. London, Chatto & Windus, 2010. {{ISBN|9780701179021}}

{{Wikiquote}}

{{wikisource|works=or}}

• {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ford-madox-ford}}
• {{Gutenberg author |id=Ford,+Ford+Madox | name=Ford Madox Ford}}
• {{FadedPage|id=Ford, Ford Madox|name=Ford Madox Ford|author=yes}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Ford Madox Ford}}
• {{Librivox author |id=281}}
• [http://www.fordmadoxford.org/ Ford Madox Ford Society]
• {{Books and Writers |id=fford |name=Ford Madox Ford}}
• [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1584 Literary Encyclopedia entry on Ford]
• [http://www.eldritchpress.org/fmf/gs.htm The Good Soldier complete]; {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150206120942/http://www.eldritchpress.org/fmf/gs.htm |date=6 February 2015 }}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20070927193359/http://www.litweb.net/biography/76/Ford%20Madox_Ford.html LitWeb.net: Ford Madox Ford Biography]
• [http://www.fordmadoxford.org/international-ford-madox-ford-studies.html International Ford Madox Ford Studies]
• [http://fordmadoxford.org/last-post-journal Last Post, literary journal dedicated to Ford Madox Ford]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20091225135103/http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/manuscripts/mlc/findingaidshtml/wtu00046.html The Ford Madox Ford Papers at Washington University in St. Louis]
• [https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/repositories/2/resources/1541 The Papers of Ford Madox Ford] at Dartmouth College Library

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{{Ford Madox Brown}}

{{Modernism}}

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