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to date. As a general rule, it is unwise to make too much of correlations between a writer’s life and work, but in the case of this text it is practically irresistible. Ford’s life was in disarray by 1913. Having married Elsie Martindale, his childhood sweetheart, in 1894, he seems to have fallen in love with her sister, Mary Martindale, at some point around 1903. Following the discovery of their relationship, Ford suffered a nervous breakdown in 1904. Early in August that year he went abroad to recuperate at a number of spas in Germany (but not at Nauheim on this occasion) and elsewhere on the Continent, and by the following year, 1905, he had made a reasonable recovery, though the after-effects of his breakdown, in particular agoraphobia, were to stay with him for the rest of his life. In 1909 he left his wife for Violet Hunt, a fashionable writer, whom he ‘married’ in 1911, though he was not divorced from Elsie. But further instability, both emotional and professional, followed, and by the time he sat down to write The Good Soldier in 1913 a young woman named Brigit Patmore (with whom he had also fallen in love) was on the point of rejecting him and he had become estranged from two of his closest male companions: temporarily from Conrad, and permanently from a Tory squire named Arthur Marwood, with whom he had been intimate, almost continuously, since they had first met in 1905. In the ‘Dedicatory Letter’ Ford says that he put ‘all that I knew about writing’ into The Good Soldier, and it seems certain that he also poured into it a great deal of the passion, disappointment and pain he had accumulated in his life to date. Just how much of his real life Ford imported into his novel is a question which has always intrigued its admirers. Graham Greene, one of the most avid, once wrote:

the impression which will be left most strongly on the reader is the sense of Ford’s involvement. A novelist is not a vegetable absorbing nourishment mechanically from soil and air: material is not easily or painlessly gained, and one cannot help wondering what agonies of frustration and error lay behind [it].23

In an earlier work, The Spirit of the People (1907), Ford described how he had witnessed the actual event on which he based Ashburnham’s parting from Nancy in Part Four of The Good Soldier. One summer he stayed at the house of a married couple – ’good people’ – and a young woman, the husband’s ward, was also resident. An ‘attachment’ had grown up between the husband and the ward and it was decided to send the young woman round the world with some friends. When the day came for the ward to depart, Ford, like Dowell, was asked to ride to a nearby railway station in a dogcart with the husband and his ward. As the young woman boarded her train Ford noticed that ‘P–. never even shook her by the hand: touching the flap of his cloth cap sufficed for leave-taking… it was playing the game to the bitter end. It was, indeed, very much the bitter end, since Miss W–. died at Brindisi on the voyage out, and P–. spent the next three years at various places on the Continent where nerve cures are attempted.’24 (It is from Brindisi, of course, that Nancy sends Ashburnham the jolly-hockey-sticks telegram which prompts him to slit his throat with his ‘little neat penknife’.)

As Dowell recognizes on two occasions, there is a ‘curious coincidence of dates’ in his story, and this, too, may have a biographical explanation which has now been lost:

[Florence] had been born on the 4th of August [1874]; she had started to go round the world on the 4th of August [1899]; she had become a low fellow’s mistress on the 4th August [1900]. On the same day of the year [ie, 4 August 1901] she had married me; on… 4th [August 1913] she had lost Edward’s love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a sinister omen – like a grin on the face of Fate.

The afternoon excursion to Marburg also occurs on 4 August (1904) and precisely ten years later, on 4 August 1914, the ‘sinister omen[s]’ which had long portended the First World War were suddenly reified in the German invasion