The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen - Hardcover

Ford Madox Ford - novelist, poet, critic, champion of young authors, travel writer, chronicler of his own times - was a man "mad about writing." As Ezra Pound observed, Ford "actually lived the heroic artistic life that Yeats talked about." An incorrigible bohemian who passed as "a nice old gentleman at a tea party," Ford devoted himself to literature and the arts, founding two important literary magazines, The English Review and the transatlantic review, and writing over eighty books, including The Good Soldier and Parade's End.
In 1917, when he was serving in the British army, Ford met the Australian painter Stella Bowen, then studying with Walter Sickert at the Westminster School of Art. They lived together from 1919 to 1928, at first in an old laborer's cottage in Sussex, where they rebuilt their lives in the aftermath of the Great War. For Stella, orphaned at an early age, their home together was "a place in the sun and against the rain too." For Ford, who at first felt that he could no longer write, this was the beginning of a new life, one in which the strength and sanity of his companion did much to encourage the completion of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. In fact, much of the raw material for Parade's End is found in these letters. We see the honesty, stoicism, and sanity of Stella Bowen in Ford's heroine Valentine Wannop.
Stella's own story is of particular interest to readers today. After their break-up, she was a single parent, struggling to support herself and her daughter Julie by painting portraits in England and by acting as Ford's literary agent in London. Ford's poverty during the thirties, in spite of his continuous production of books and articles, made him and Bowen equals in the struggle for survival.
The letters provide a portrait of Ford not found in his memoirs and biographies: "I write to you as I never took the trouble to write to any other soul," he tells Stella, "how I really feel under a placid exterior." His attitudes toward religion, education, morality, marriage, and art - the true subjects of his fiction - are here expressed clearly and unequivocally.