Book Description
Engaging and energetic, this biography of Ford Madox Ford presents the modernist writer in a previously unexplored way. Other biographies have approached Ford as an author; indeed, his memoirs give almost no indication that the women in his life were of any importance or, in fact, that they ever existed. Literary scholar Joseph Wiesenfarth revises this approach by tracing Ford’s relationships with four women central to his life. Wiesenfarth shows how these four women—Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala—established themselves as artists in their own right and depicted Ford in their works as more than the "proper man" he thought himself to be. For the women, he was both a lover and a leaver, a collaborator and a companion. With an eye to original paintings and manuscripts, Wiesenfarth examines the artistic and romantic interplay among these writers, painters, and lovers. This book features a beautifully illustrated color and black-and-white gallery of Bowen and Biala paintings.

From the Inside Flap
"Joseph Wiesenfarth’s valuable book provides an angle of vision that illuminates all of the participants’ art in considerable detail and offers a timely contribution to an aspect of Ford Madox Ford’s life and work that has never before been presented in this way."—Andrzej Gasiorek, author of Post-War British Fiction "Scholars of modernism owe a substantial debt to Joseph Wiesenfarth, especially those working on Ford Madox Ford, on whom he has been producing a stream of pioneering and perceptive essays for forty years. The critical and biographical expertise of his work on Ford’s contacts with other writers has greatly enhanced not just our sense of Ford’s literary life, but of his impact on the history of modernism."— Max Saunders, author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life and coeditor of Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity

About the Author
Joseph Wiesenfarth is professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the editor of two collections of essays on Ford and the author of six books, including Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.