Ford, Ford Madox

Ford, Ford Madox (formerly Ford Hermann Hueffer) (1873–1939), spent much of his childhood in Pre-Raphaelite circles, an inheritance which deeply affected him. His first published works were fairy stories (The Brown Owl, 1892, etc.). In 1894 he eloped with and married Elsie Martindale. In 1898 he met Conrad and they collaborated in various works including the novels The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903); but from 1901 their relationship deteriorated. During a diverse and productive literary career Ford published over 80 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and developed his own theory of ‘Impressionism’ in the novel. His Fifth Queen trilogy (1907, 1907, 1908) describes in ornate and colourful prose the fate of Catherine Howard, wife of Henry VIII, portrayed as an earnest, innocent Catholic idealist. In 1908 Ford embarked on two significant enterprises, an affair with the glamorous and emancipated novelist Violet Hunt, which was to involve him in scandal and in complex, unsuccessful divorce proceedings; and the founding of the English Review, which he edited for 15 months.

In 1915 Ford published what he himself regarded as his finest achievement, The Good Soldier, and in the same year enlisted in the army. The war inspired his other major work of fiction, Parade's End, which was published in four parts between 1924 and 1928. Ford moved to Paris in 1922 where he founded in 1924 the Transatlantic Review. During his last years, which were spent in France and America, he published several volumes of autobiography and reminiscence (including Return to Yesterday, 1931, and It Was the Nightingale, 1933) and a volume of criticism, The March of Literature (1938). As an editor, he has long been regarded as a highly influential figure whose devotion to literature and ready appreciation of originality and quality in others (see Modernism) did much to shape the course of 20th-cent. writing.