Ford Madox Ford

The March 27, 2025, issue of The New York Review of Books contains “The Chronicler of Unhappiness” by Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for The Washington Post. Nominally written as a review of the biography Ford Madox Ford by Max Saunders, this well-written and entertaining article surveys Ford’s life and works. From reading the article, I have added several books to my want-to-read list.

Saunders’s biography is a condensed version of his two-volume biography Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996).

Ford Madox Ford, early in his writing career, wrote two fairy tales, The Brown Owl (1891) and The Queen Who Flew (1894); these are often included in collections of fairy tales.

Ford wrote a highly-regarded three-book series about Catherine Howard and Henry VIII:

• The Fifth Queen (1906)
• Privy Seal (1907)
• The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908)

Ford’s most well-known book is The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915). I listened to the audiobook in 2012, and my notes say the book was very good. I need to listen to this book again because I don’t remember it.

Ford was an admirer of Marcel Proust and attended Proust’s funeral in 1922. Dirda writes that Ford considered translating Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu but instead wrote his own Proust-like series, Parade’s End. Dirda continues:

Like the French writer’s roman-fleuve, Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy charts the breakdown of an elegant, self-confident society in which long-standing traditions crumble during the upheaval of World War I.

Since I’m currently on my fourth reading of Proust’s masterpiece, I’m intrigued to learn about this other series. The four volumes are:

• Some Do Not… (1924)
• No More Parades (1925)
• A Man Could Stand Up— (1926)
• Last Post (1928)

Dirda also recommends Ford’s The Rash Act (1933), in which an American takes the identity of another man, a rich suicide.