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The Ford Madox Ford Society

Welcome

This international society was founded in 1997 to promote knowledge of and interest in the life and works of Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939).

Become A Member

Welcome to the official website of the Ford Madox Ford Society

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The author of nearly 80 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 the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-8). He was also a well-regarded poet, memoirist, critic 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. 

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.

Seamus O'Malley
Society Chair

Read Seamus O'Malley's full welcome here

Now on open-access:
​Last Post​ 3, 4 & 5!

Elizabeth Hibbert's two-part survey of the critical reception of Parade's End; a Ford story reprinted; pieces on C. H. Sisson, Walter de la Mare and Gilbert Cannan; a full menu of Ford and food; reviews, our three regular columnists and more.  ​
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From the Last Post blog

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A New Forest Typo: The Origins of Branshaw Teleragh
By Andrew Gustar
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In the early 1800s, a message could be sent between Plymouth and London in a matter of minutes. The Admiralty Shutter Telegraph, devised by Lord George Murray during the Napoleonic Wars, consisted of a series of hilltop signalling stations, each manned by a naval officer and two ratings, who sent signals by opening and closing combinations of six shutters in a vertical frame, and monitored signals from neighbouring stations through powerful telescopes. Similar communication lines were in place between the Admiralty and Portsmouth, Deal, Sheerness and Great Yarmouth.

One such telegraph station was in the New Forest, Read More...


News from the Lamb family archives: Elsie speaks
By Sara Haslam

August 1893: The Questions at the Well by Fenil Haig [the first of many pseudonyms Ford used] was published by Digby, Long & Co., dedicated to Miss Elsie Martindale.

Aside from the number of Elsie Martindale’s typed and handwritten story manuscripts, and the books of Ford’s that remained together in her possession, the most striking thing to this Ford scholar invited to explore the papers held by her descendants in Dublin were her diaries. Read More...

Ford on Social Media

Tweets by @FordMadoxFordie

Scholarly Resources

​Critical writing on Ford 

Download sample chapters from International Ford Madox Ford Studies

FMF Society News​

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Just published!
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Ford Madox Ford by Max Saunders, 216pp, 42 illustrations, ISBN 9781789147018, paperback £12.99.
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Anyone interested in Ford will want this book!

It’s in the Critical Lives series from Reaktion Books (distributed in the US by University of Chicago Press, coming there in May).

Illustrated essay on Biala!​
Carine Chicherau’s fascinating essay on the painter Janice Biala, Ford’s partner for the last decade of his life, is now available in both French and English (with a translation by Noémie Jennifer Bonnet).
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Original text in French:
https://diacritik.com/2022/12/15/peintresses-en-france-15-janice-biala-1903-2000-la-peinture-pour-patrie/
English translation available here (includes a link to the French text):
https://www.janicebiala.org/news/2022/12/23/article-peintresses-en-france-janice-biala-via-diacritik 

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Last Post
Ford Society members: please contact us if you haven't received your copy of Last Post 6 & 7; and please let us know if you have changed your address.

If you don't currently subscribe but would like to, information on how to do so is elsewhere on this website. See: 'About Us'

A major project, the Collected Letters of Ford Madox Ford in 6 volumes! 
​The Ford Society is delighted to announce a new project to address this significant gap in twentieth-century literary scholarship. ​Ford was a superb letter-writer, and yet the vast majority of his c.3,000 known letters remains unavailable in published versions. Its General Editors are Sara Haslam and Max Saunders, and Oxford University Press will be publishing the volumes.
​Read more...

​Populism
Any reader of the latest issue of Last Post whose interest was aroused by Seamus O'Malley's essay, 'Impressionist Populism? Ford, "The People", and le peuple', may like to know that his  book, Irish Culture and 'The People": Populism and its Discontents, is available from Oxford University Press.

Recording Available of Jason Andrew’s online talk
 There’s a recording of the recent online event, ‘Biala (1903-2000): The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape’, a fascinating talk by Jason Andrew, curator of the Biala Estate, with Biala’s letters splendidly voiced by Julia Gleich. The link is: https://youtu.be/W8x21VbWqvc. 
 
The talk was given under the auspices of the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, Inc., in New York. Our thanks to Executive Director Rachel Stern and the Fritz Ascher Society

In Media​

Prolific hero Ford
In October 2022, Rachel Cooke interviewed the novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, who remarked at one point that writing comes easily to him and he can’t see any reason to stop. “It’s joy, pure joy. The pleasure of blackening the page, of creating something, imagining it. My heroes are prolific writers: Georges Simenon, Patrick White, Ford Madox Ford.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/02/paul-theroux-bad-angel-brothers-interview
 
Ford under the hammer
The sale of Joan Didion’s  estate, at Stair Galleries in New York in November 2022, included some of the favourite books from her library, a lot containing fifteen of the nineteen titles she’d listed, among them novels by Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Ernest Hemingway, Renata Adler, Dostoevsky and John O’Hara. It also included an Everyman’s Library edition of Ford’s The Good Soldier. The estimate for the lot was $800 to $1200: the eventual hammer price was $26,000. (Even that price was pipped by a pair of Didion’s sunglasses, which went for $27,000.)

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Ford Madox Ford Society


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