Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (born Ford Hermann Hueffer) 17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. Full birth name seen as Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer.

Ford is now remembered for his novels The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–28) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–08). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read".

family

Ford was born in Wimbledon to Catherine Madox Brown and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. Ford's father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Ford used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer, but in 1919 he changed it to Ford Madox Ford (allegedly after World War I because "Hueffer" sounded too Germanic) in honour of his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written.

In 1894, Ford eloped with his school girlfriend Elsie Martindale. The couple were married in Gloucester and moved to Bonnington. In 1901, the couple moved to Winchelsea.

The couple had two daughters, Christina (born 1897) and Katharine (born 1900).

Violet Hunt carried on a number of relationships, mostly with older men. Among her lovers were Somerset Maugham and H. G. Wells, though her most notable affair was with the married Hueffer [Ford Madox Ford], who lived with her from about 1910 to 1918 at her home South Lodge (a period including his brief 1911 imprisonment). She was fictionalised by him in two novels: as the scheming Florence Dowell in The Good Soldier and as the promiscuous Sylvia Tietjens in his tetralogy Parade's End.

Between 1918 and 1927 he lived with Stella Bowen, an Australian artist twenty years his junior.

In 1920, Ford and Bowen had a daughter, Julia Madox Ford.

He had an affair with writer Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously.

legacy

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."

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."

source: Wikipedia: Ford Madox Ford

biography

From Ford Madox Ford Society

The writer now known as Ford Madox Ford was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, editor, and reminiscer. He is one of the most intriguing, versatile, and often still misunderstood of the great Modernist writers. He was brought up in London, the grandson of Ford Madox Brown, the painter closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. At the turn of the century he lived on the Romney Marsh, befriending Henry James and Stephen Crane, and beginning a ten-year collaboration with Joseph Conrad. In the years before the First World War he moved to London, where he founded the English Review, bringing together many of the best established writers of the day – James, Thomas Hardy, Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett – with his new discoveries, many of whom would help redefine modern literature, such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. His major work of the Edwardian period includes the Fifth Queen trilogy of historical novels about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard (1906-08); the trilogy of impressionist books about England and the English (1905-07) and the novels A Call (1910) and – Ford’s best-known and most highly-regarded novel – The Good Soldier (1915). During the war he wrote propaganda; but in 1915 enlisted, serving in France in 1916-17 during the Battle of the Somme and at the Ypres Salient. He was invalided back to Britain in 1917, remaining in the army and giving lectures. After a spell recuperating in the Sussex countryside after the war, Ford lived mostly in France during the 1920s, first in Provence, then in Paris. He published his other major fictional work, the series of four novels known as Parade’s End, between 1924 and 1928. These were particularly well-received in America, where Ford spent much of his time from the later 1920s to his death in 1939.

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• Religion: Catholicism
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• http://www.fordmadoxfordsociety.org/
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