The works of Ford Maddox Ford with particular reference to the novels

• Main Author: Coetzee, John M
• Other Authors: Howarth, R G
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2016
• Subjects: English Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22298

The present study is not biographical. It does, however, attempt to suggest the main lines of Ford's life and their immediate effect on his writing. Concentrating principally on his fiction, to which he gave himself most wholly, it examines his novels in chronological order and attempts to trace a course of development in them. This seems particularly necessary to do in the light of the legend Ford himself, with some excuse, spread that The Good Soldier, in fact his seventeenth independent novel, sprang from him unheralded in his forty-first year. The conclusion of this study is that The Good Soldier, probably the finest example of literary pure mathematics in English, is, as Ford considered it, his best achievement; but it attempts to trace in earlier novels experiments without which The Good Soldier would have been impossible.