Ford Madox Ford

In this thorough contribution to Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, Saunders (Imagined Futures), a literature professor at the University of Birmingham, examines the writings of English novelist Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939). Saunders contends that Ford was a critical architect and exemplar of literary impressionism, an approach characterized by its attention to the perceptions of characters and refusal of omniscient accounts. Ford, Saunders argues, developed this literary style through his collaborations with Joseph Conrad, whose emphasis on detail and character interiority rubbed off on Ford’s The Good Soldier. Additionally, Ford served as a bridge between literary impressionists and their modernist successors; his critical writings grouped Conrad, Henry James, and Stephen Crane under the impressionist moniker despite none of them having described themselves as such, and then claimed this movement’s concern with interiority “a necessary prelude” to modernism’s focus on capturing the feeling and sensation of consciousness. The analysis is sharp but comes across as rushed, quickly jumping from Ford’s fiction to his personal life—including accounts of his numerous love affairs and the mental health crisis he suffered in his early thirties—and the broader literary currents of the day. Still, this testifies to the talents of a literary master of the modernist era. Photos. (Apr.)