The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [0]
FORD MADDOX FORD was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in Surrey in 1873. He married Elsie Martindale in 1894. His first published works were fairy stories. In 1898 he met Joseph Conrad and they collaborated on several works including the novels The Inheritors and Romance. Ford published over eighty books in total, The Fifth Queen appearing in three parts during the period 1906–8. In 1915 he published The Good Soldier, which he regarded as his finest achievement. In the same year he enlisted in the army and served as an infantry officer. Parade’s End, the culmination of his experiences during the First World War, was published in four parts between 1924 and 1928. Ford moved to Paris in 1922 and two years later founded the Transatlantic Review, whose contributors included, among others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. In his later years he divided his time between France and America. Ford also published several volumes of autobiography and reminiscence, including Return to Yesterday (1931) and It Was the Nightingale (1934). A final characteristically personal and ambitious volume of criticism, The March of Literature, appeared in 1939, the year he died.
Educated at Newcastle University and the University of Oxford, David Bradshaw is Hawthornden Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford. He has edited The Hidden Huxley (1994), Brave New World (1994) and Oxford World’s Classics editions of The White Peacock (1997), Women in Love (1998), Mrs Dalloway (2000) and The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction (2001) by Virginia Woolf. In addition he has edited Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall for Penguin Classics (2001), a volume on Modernism for Blackwell (2002) and has published articles on Bloomsbury, Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Huxley, Woolf, Yeats and various aspects of literature and politics in the 1930s. He is an Editor of the Review of English Studies and a Fellow of the English Association.
FORD MADOX FORD
The Good Soldier
Edited by DAVID BRADSHAW
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Egjinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by The Bodley Head 1915
Published in Penguin Books 1946
3
Introduction and editorial material copyright © David Bradshaw, 2002
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN:978-0-14-193719-9
Contents
Introduction
Selected Reading
Note on the Text
Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Notes
Introduction
This may or may not be ‘the saddest story’ you will ever hear, but it will certainly be one of the best. As a tale of the ‘broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic’ human condition it has few equals and it spellbinds from the beginning. Ford once said that he and his friend