The Good Soldier

(Hardback)

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The Good Soldier (1915) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. Set just before the First World War, the novel is superficially the story of Edward Asburnham, a man with a reputation for philandering. Considered an important proto-modernist novel, The Good Soldier employs a fragmented narrative told by an unreliable narrator who appears at times as distant, gossipy, voyeuristic, and even vindictive. Praised as one of the greatest English-language novels of the century, The Good Soldier remains Fords most popular work. John Dowell has secrets. Married for nine years to a serially unfaithful woman, friends with a man who falls in love at first sight with every woman he meets, he lives an exciting life without ever doing much himself. As he sorts through his memories, revealing the sordid details of his loved ones private lives, it becomes clear that Dowell is haunted by tragedy. His psychological state, shaped by years of jealousy and paranoia, reveals the soul of a man without faith, thrown from one betrayal to the next by his manipulative wife. But how could he fail to see what was right under his nose Can a man truly be as innocent as Dowell claims to be The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of English fiction that poses timeless questions regarding friendship, fidelity, and sexuality. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Ford Madox Fords The Good Soldier is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.

Author Bio

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Fords masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem Antwerp (1915) and his tetralogy Parades End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.