The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad

by Ford Madox Ford

Of all Ford Madox Ford's critical works, The English Novel (first published in 1930) is his most satisfying. He wrote it while memory plays a large part. Our guide - a major innovative novelist of the century - takes us on a tour of the key literary form of the age, from its birth to his own time. Ford understands the novel, its development and potential. His radical view of nineteenth-century fiction and his advocacy of Flaubert and Conrad are persuasive. His association with Conrad makes the passages on the author of Nostromo (to which he contributed) especially compelling. We are offered 'suggestions not dictates'. Ford espouses no he urges a fresh reading of the best work in our tradition, with pointers in unexpected directions. Seventy years after it was written, The English Novel remains compulsively readable.

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.

Ford is now remembered for his novels The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–1928) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read".

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this short work very illuminating, a sweep over the English Novel from Shakespeare and Bunyan through to (then) modern day authors, Conrad, James and Crane - well, I say sweep, but he is fairly good at pointing out how literary novelists in Britain often have stood alone, as peaks surrounded by banal moralising. And his view that literature is held somewhat in contempt by the British, still seems to hold true today. I also like how he acknowledged how everyone had to adapt to their era; and that in the future literature might move in unexpected directions, and overturn what feels important to him in what makes a good Novel...

... Ford is becoming like an old friend, but one who is capable of provocation and surprise, whom I am very pleased to have discovered; I'm baffled as to why he isn't more prominent than he is.

[C.G. Fewston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ford spells out the history of the novel, how it came to be (up until 1930), and does so with vivid examples. He writes of the transformations of literary methods and the reformation of written dialogue. A recommend for any scholar or writer wanting to know origins of novel writing. As Ford writes, "But the fact remains that to a real master possessed of a real individuality the study of methods of his predecessors must be of enormous use" (118).