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
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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.

Call for contributions: Ford and Food

Proposed special edition of Last Post, guest edited by Helen Chambers. The deadline for proposals previously announced has now passed but our guest editor has expressed herself willing to consider proposals through to the end of September, for essays (up to 4000 words including notes and references) and/or short pieces (up to 1500 words) on Ford's relationship to food and wine in the broadest sense.

Themes, some perhaps more suitable for shorter pieces, might include among others:
  • Ecocritical approaches to food production including Ford’s gardening practices
  • Critical examination of Ford’s food and wine journalism
  • Depictions of food and wine in Ford’s fiction
  • Comparisons with the food cultures of his literary peers as revealed in their lives and writings
  • Food culture and fashions, old and new, in Ford’s France, England and America
  • Ford’s cooking styles and spaces, real and fictional
  • Biographical background to Ford’s interest in food
  • Cookery books and other related resources
  • Ford and health/ medicinal food in Ford’s writing
  • The afterlife of Ford’s food writing
All contributions should be scholarly but lucid and accessible to non-specialists. Illustrations or photographs are encouraged, but please alert the editor to any potential rights issues before contributions are finalised.
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Please send proposals and enquiries to 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.
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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

ALS Newsletter

The 2020 Autumn/Winter Newsletter from the Alliance of Literary Societies is now available to download from their website:
https://allianceofliterarysocieties.wordpress.com/newsletters/ 
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/

BAMS 2020 Essay Prize
One of the winning essays was Harriet Walters' ‘Rural Ritual, Gardened Faith: Ford Madox Ford’s Memorial Plots’. It will be published in an upcoming issue of Modernist Cultures.

In Media​

Amanda Lohrey interviewed
Interviewed in the Australian Book Review, the writer Amanda Lohrey, asked for her favourite author, replies: ‘It’s more the case that I’m in awe of individual works, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), for example. The structure is so complex, so subtle and hypnotic, that later in life Ford couldn’t recall how he’d managed it. Writers are like cat burglars trying to crack a safe, twisting the dial first this way and then that, waiting to hear the click. When they’ve busted the safe, they can’t remember the combination they happened upon.’
https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/867-interview/6751-open-page-with-amanda-lohrey
 
Books That Made Me
In the 'Books That Made Me' feature in The Guardian, the novelist Meg Rosoff, invited to choose 'The book I'd most like to be remembered for' (conventionally one by the interviewee, of course), responded: 'I'd quite like to be remembered for The Good Soldier. Who wouldn't?'
www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/17/meg-rosoff-thomas-cromwells-execution-affected-me-more-than-deaths-in-my-own-family​

Biala in Provincetown
Mary Maxwell, in the latest issue of PN Review (May-June 2020), reviews the 2018 exhibition, Biala: Provincetown Summers.

The Knap, Selsey
Artist Jennifer Mosley wrote an interesting piece on her blog about the Selsey cottage where she spent much of her childhood and which had been rented by Violet Hunt during the years of her relationship with Ford:
https://www.thewrenandthewritingdesk.com/blog-1/knapp-cottage-1
 
No More Parades End
Ford Madox Ford’s last library and what it tells us about ‘the Tietjens saga’, by Sara Haslam. TLS, 5 June 2018. Read here.
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