The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

Ford Madox Ford

Gladstone Press, Jun 2, 2020 - Fiction - 256 pages

Two wealthy Edwardian couples--one American, the other British--meet at a spa in Germany and for nine years enjoy a placid friendship. But over the course of four days, everything falls apart: love affairs are exposed, blackmail schemes uncovered, and deceptions revealed. After a sequence of shocking deaths, the polished public masks of these four respectable citizens are ripped away to reveal the heart (and heartlessness) of their carefully concealed selves.Told from the ever-shifting perspectiveof the American husband-- at turns sorrowful and comic--Ford Madox Ford's stylistically perfect novel will keep you guessing until its unsettling end: what is truth, what is façade, and who should you believe?

About the author

Ford Madox Ford (né Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer 1873-1939) was born in Merton, Surrey, and was named after his grandfather, the artist Ford Madox Brown. He changed his last name from Hueffer to Ford after the First World War as it sounded less Germanic. He founded two literary magazines: The English Review (with writer Violet Hunt), where he published works by Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence, among others; and the short-lived The Transatlantic Review, where he published writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway (who immortalized Ford as Braddocks in The Sun Also Rises), and Jean Rhys. Ford was an essaist, literary critic, poet, war propagandist, and biographer, but he is better known for his novels, including The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906-1908), The Good Soldier (1915), and the Parade's End tetralogy (1924-28). Although he remained married to Elsie Martindale until his death, she refused to divorce him and he abandoned both her and their daughters in 1909, cohabitating with various lovers throughout his lifetime. He died in Deauville, France, in 1939 after a brief illness.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
• Author: Ford Madox Ford
• Publisher: Gladstone Press, 2020
• ISBN: 1989544029, 9781989544020
• Length: 256 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Psychological