Of all Ford Madox Ford's critical works, The English Novel (first published in 1930) is his most satisfying. He wrote it while travelling: memory plays a large part. Our guide - a major innovative novelist of the century - takes us 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 nineteenth-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. We are offered 'suggestions not dictates'. Ford espouses no orthodoxy: he urges a fresh reading of the best work in our tradition, with pointers in unexpected directions. Seventy years after it was written, The English Novel remains compulsively readable.
