Welcome to the official website of the Ford Madox Ford Society

The author of over eighty books and the founding editor of two groundbreaking periodicals, the English Review (1908-10) and the transatlantic review (1924), Ford is best known as the writer of The Good Soldier (1915), and Parade’s End (1924-8). He was also a well-regarded poet, memoirist and cultural impressionist, including among his works a ‘personal remembrance’ of Joseph Conrad and a number of books about his ‘Pre-Raphaelite childhood’.

This site has been designed to provide information about the Society’s activities, about Ford’s life and work, and about the published work and scholarship available on Ford. 

As of 2014 there is a North American chapter of the Society, formed to advance interest in Ford in the US.

If you are an admirer, an enthusiast, a reader, a scholar, or a student of anything Fordian, then this society would like to hear from you, and welcomes your participation in its activities.

Sara Haslam
Society Chair
Picture
Click on the image for more publications

The first and second issues of Last Post are now available for open access download! 

In light of the current pandemic, which interrupted shipments to some of our members and contributors, the Ford Society is pleased to announce the early electronic release of our second issue of Last Post. Click here to find out more and download the full issues.

Last Post 5 

 Last Post 5 will be a special issue on Ford and Food​, guest edited by Helen Chambers:   helenmchambers32@gmail.com
The deadline for final submissions will be 30 November 2020.

​​Routledge Research Companion

The Routledge Research Companion (image below) to Ford Madox Ford is an invaluable resource for students and scholars in Ford Studies. Read more.
Picture
Ford c. 1915 © Alfred Cohen, 2000
SPECIAL WEB FEATURE: 

​Critical writing on Ford 

Download latest sample chapters from International Ford Madox Ford Studies

FMF Society News

Literature and Modern Time
​Several luminaries of the Ford Society are among the contributors to Literature and Modern Time, edited by Trish Ferguson, just published by Palgrave Macmillan:​ 
https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030292775
Reading and Wellbeing
This current blog series has a recent post by our Society chair, Sara Haslam:
https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/about-us/ies-virtual-community/literature-lockdown/hobar-reading-and-wellbeing-blog
And another by Fordian (and Conradian) Helen Chambers:
https://englishstudies.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2020/06/29/reading-for-wellbeing-on-board-the-torrens/

In Media​

Ford mentioned in the LA Review of Books
In his piece on Martin Amis’s new book (is it a novel? is it a memoir?), Sunil Iyengar remarked: ‘More than once while reading Inside Story, your reviewer harked back to Ford Madox Ford’s 1931 memoir Return to Yesterday, which bears this caveat:

Where it has seemed expedient to me I have altered episodes that I have witnessed but I have been careful never to distort the character of the episode. The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions. If you want factual accuracies you must go to … But no, no, don’t go to anyone, stay with me!’
 
The Fordian paragraph from which Iyengar quotes these lines actually begins: ‘So this is a novel’ – but, of course, that might have complicated things even more.

See: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/keeping-it-real-on-martin-amiss-inside-story/


​Ford's Fifth Queen trilogy
Eamon Duffy’s ‘In defence of More, a man of principle’ (TLS, 13 November 2020), cites Ford’s Fifth Queen trilogy as ‘the high point of Victorian and Edwardian fictionalizations of the Tudor reformations’, though he remarks that, while Ford’s use of ‘a modernized version of Tudor diction has been praised’, twenty-first century readers ‘are likely to be daunted by its archaism’. He also comments that the trilogy ‘plays fast and loose with the facts of history, a freedom Ford justified on the grounds that “The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions”’.

​Ford on ‘inevitability’
Tom Crewe, in ‘On the Shelf’, London Review of Books, 42, 19 (8 October 2020), quotes Ford on ‘inevitability’, while writing about William Godwin's Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are. The passage, in which Ford is discussing ‘the mystic word “justification”’, comes from his Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), 204.
 
Biala in Provincetown
Mary Maxwell, in the latest issue of PN Review (May-June 2020), reviews the 2018 exhibition, Biala: Provincetown Summers.
Ford Madox Ford Society

@FordMadoxFordie
Registered Charity No. 1084040
Disclaimer
Ford Madox Ford Society