Ford Madox FordS Literary Contacts

9789042022485

9042022485

This book takes Ford¿s 'literary contacts¿ to include such creative friendships, editorial involvements, and influential biographical encounters; and they form the most substantial, central section on 'Contemporaries and Confrères¿, covering figures like Proust, Carlos Williams, Rebecca West, Herbert Read, and Hemingway. But it also explores contacts with literary texts. The first section on 'Predecessors¿ considers the impact of Ford¿s reading of Trollope, George Eliot, and Turgenev. The final section discusses 'Successors¿: writers such as Graham Greene, Burgess, and A. S. Byatt, whose literary contacts with Ford have been as his admiring readers and eloquent critics. Ford has been described as 'a writer¿s writer¿. This volume reveals how true that has been, and in how many ways, as it sheds new light on his relationships with other writers, both familiar and surprising. It includes two pieces published here for the first time: one by Ford himself, on Turgenev; the other a memoir about Ford by his contemporary, Marie Belloc Lowndes (the sister of Hilaire Belloc).