Introduction: Misfit Moderns

Ford Madox Ford is a major figure of the modernist age. During a career spanning the five decades that saw the modernist experiment reach its zenith — from the 1890s through to the 1930s — he wrote more than eighty books and is best known as the writer of two exemplary modernist works: The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–28). Ford is also known for his close associations with and unerring support for other innovative and experimental writers amongst his contemporaries. Following their first meeting in 1898, Ford collaborated with Joseph Conrad on two full-length novels and one novella, and during a decade-long friendship the two authors developed a doctrine of literary ‘Impressionism’. Ford also founded and edited two groundbreaking periodicals, the English Review in Edwardian London (1908–1910) and the transatlantic review in postwar Paris (1924), in which he published the work of important modernist figures such as Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. However, Ford’s is a curious kind of centrality: despite the modernist pedigree of his major novels, many of his lesser-known works do not fulfil the expectations generated by his masterpieces or, indeed, by the category of modernism. Ford, in other words, remains something of a misfit. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.