The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [19]
Carol Jacobs, ‘The (too) Good Soldier: “a real story” ‘, in Telling Time: Lévi-Strauss, Ford, Lessing, Benjamin, de Man, Wordsworth, Rilke (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 75–94.
Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford (1990).
Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (1991).
Richard Wald Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art (1964).
David H. Lynn, The Hero’s Tale: Narrative in the Early Modern Novel (1989).
Frank MacShane (ed.), Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage (1972; 1997). ——, The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford (1965).
John A. Meixner, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (1962).
Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (1972).
Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (1980).
Carol B. Ohmann, Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman (1964).
C. Ruth Sabol and Todd K. Bender, A Concordance to Ford Madox Ford’s ‘The Good Soldier’ (1981).
Max Saunders (ed.), Special Ford double issue of Agenda, 27, No. 4/28, No. 1 (Winter 1989–Spring 1990). See esp. the essays by Carol Jacobs on Ford’s fictional theories (67–76) and by Wilbur Sanders on Ford’s drama of narration (85–92).
Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (1996). This standard critical biography of Ford contains the most exhaustive single essay on the novel.
Grover Smith, Ford Madox Ford (1972).
Ann Barr Snitow, Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty (1984).
Sondra J. Stang (ed.), The Presence of Ford Madox Ford: A Memorial Volume of Essays, Poems, and Memoirs (1981).
——, Ford Madox Ford (1977).
Joseph Wiesenfarth (ed.), Special Ford issue (‘Ford Madox Ford and the Arts’) of Contemporary Literature, 30, No. 2 (Summer 1989). See esp. the article by Sondra J. Stang and Maryann De Julio on Ford’s own translation into French of The Good Soldier, of which 37 manuscript pages have survived (263–79).
Paul L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (1962).
Note on the Text
The extant manuscripts of The Good Soldier are held by Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare Books and Manuscript Collections. One manuscript comprises 376 pages of holograph and typescript, and a second, probably the printer’s copy, consists of 305 pages of typescript.
Among other things, these manuscript sources reveal intriguing evidence of Ford’s remodelling of Edward Ashburnham. By discarding material which projected him as an unregenerate libertine (and the father of a number of illegitimate children), Ford accentuated the tragic sentimentalist in Ashburnham and made him less obviously the principal cause of the novel’s abundant suffering. For a full account of the various changes which Ford made, see The Good Soldier ed. Martin Stannard (New York and London: Norton, 1995), 179–216, and Charles G. Hoffmann, ‘Ford’s Manuscript Revisions of The Good Soldier’, English Literature in Transition, 9, No. 4 (1966), 145–52.
The copy-text for this edition of The Good Soldier is the first English edition of the novel, published by John Lane on 17 March 1915 (which was also, almost certainly, the date of the first American edition). There is a reference to ‘Waterbury, Ill.[inois]’ in Part Four, Chapter 2 of the first edition, but no such place existed in 1915 (nor does it exist today). Ford obviously had in mind ‘Waterbury, Conn.[ecticut]’, and the text has been amended accordingly. Similarly, in Part One, Chapter 2, this edition changes the first edition’s ‘Frantz Hals’ and ‘Woovermans’ to ‘Frans Hals’ and ‘Wouwerman’ on the grounds that the 1915 spellings were clearly unintentional errors.
Foreign words seem to have been italicized almost at random in the first edition: ‘Schreibzimmer’ (writing-room), for example, was set in italics, whereas ‘Reiseverkehrsbureau’ (travel agency) was not. In this edition, an effort has been made to introduce consistent practice in this