About the Author

FORD MADOX FORD (the name he adopted in 1919: he was originally Ford Hermann Hueffer) was born in Merton, Surrey, in 1873. His mother, Catherine, was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. His father, Francis Hueffer, was a German emigré, a musicologist and music critic for The Times. Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were his aunt and uncle by marriage. Ford published his first book, a children’s fairy-tale, when he was seventeen. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad from 1898 to 1908, and also befriended many of the best writers of his time, including Henry James, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy and Thomas Hardy. He is best known for his novels, especially The Fifth Queen (a trilogy about Henry VII; 1906–8); The Good Soldier (1915); and Parade’s End (his tetralogy about the First World War). He was also an influential poet and critic, and a brilliant magazine editor. He founded The English Review in 1908, discovering D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, who became another close friend. Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment 1915–19. After the war he moved to France. In Paris he founded the transatlantic review, taking on Ernest Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering Jean Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the 1920s and 1930s he moved between Paris, New York, and Provence. He died in Deauville in June 1939. The author of over eighty books, Ford is a major presence in twentieth-century writing.

MAX SAUNDERS is Professor of English at King’s College London, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, American and European literature. He wrote Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, published by Oxford University Press in two volumes (1996), and has edited Ford’s Selected Poems (1997) and War Prose (1999) for Carcanet’s ‘Millennium Ford’ series.

RICHARD STANG is Professor Emeritus of Washington University in St Louis. His previous publications include The Theory of the Novel in England 1850–1870 (Columbia University Press) and Discussions of George Eliot (Boston).