Romance
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About the author
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 Ford’s 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 Parade’s 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.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was a Polish-British novelist. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he was the son of Apollo Korzeniowski, a Polish poet and revolutionary. Conrad’s childhood was marked by ill health and constant travel due to his father’s political commitments, and he was placed in the care of his uncle following Apollo’s death in 1869. In 1874, he was sent to Marseilles to pursue a career as a merchant marine, which he continued until 1893, when he first settled in London. By this time, he had already begun his first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), which earned him a reputation as an adventure writer. Struggling to establish himself as an English writer, facing xenophobia and financial stress, Conrad nevertheless produced some of the greatest literary works of his era, including Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907). Recognized as a pioneering figure of early modernism, Conrad also collaborated with English novelist Ford Madox Ford on three acclaimed novels: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of a Crime (1924). Controversial for his depictions of colonialism and imperialism, Conrad has been alternatively viewed as a racist and opponent of racism by scholars, many of whom set their arguments alongside Chinua Achebe’s influential essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” a central text of postcolonial criticism.
