Ford Madox Ford's critical work The English Novel was written while traveling: it does not smell of the lamp or the library. Ford guides readers 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 19th-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. Ford offers “suggestions not dictates” and espouses no orthodoxy. He urges a fresh reading of the best work in the English tradition, with pointers in unexpected directions. Seventy years after it was written, The English Novel remains compulsively readable. A definite critic in his sure understanding of technique, Ford's taste and his perception of directions in literature are vivid and suggestive.
