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Parade's End: Volume I

Some Do Not . . . A Novel

Ford Madox Ford

Edited by Max Saunders

Parade's End Volume I
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 20th Century, War writings
Imprint: Carcanet Fiction
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2012)
9781847778598
£18.95 £17.05
Paperback (520 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2010)
9781847770127
Out of Stock
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  • He had stood at the hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque sounds... He had turned and walked down the path, she following him. He had exclaimed:

    "It's perhaps too... untidy..."

    She had said:

    "Yes! Yes... Ugly... Too... oh... private!"

    He said, he remembered:

    "But... for ever..."

     She said, in a great hurry:

    "But when you come back... Permanently. And... oh, as if it were in public." ... "I don't know," she had added. "Ought we?... I'd be ready..." She added: "I will be ready for anything you ask."
    Some Do Not..., the first volume of Parade’s End, introduces the central characters: Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant mathematician; his dazzling, unfaithful wife Sylvia; and the young Suffragette Valentine Wannop. It starts with the cataclysmic weekend that throws Tietjens and Valentine together. It ends in 1917 as the two are on the verge of becoming lovers, before Tietjens prepares to return to the Front and probable death.

    Some Do Not . . . is an unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society facing catastrophe, as the energies of sexuality and power erupt into violence.

    Some Do Not . . . includes:
    -- the first reliable text, based on the manuscript and first editions
    -- a major critical introduction by Max Saunders, Ford’s acclaimed biographer
    -- an account of the novel’s composition and reception
    -- a reconstruction of Ford’s dramatic original ending, published complete for the first time
    -- annotations explaining historical references, military terms, literary and topical allusions
    -- a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions
    -- a bibliography of further reading

    Cover painting: Paul Nash, The Ypres Salient at Night, 1918, IWM Art 1145. By permission of the Imperial War Museum. Cover design: StephenRaw.com
    Acknowledgements
    List of Illustrations
    List of Short Titles
    Introduction
    A Note on this Edition of Parade’s End
    A Note on the Text of Some Do Not ...


    Some Do Not... A Novel

    Textual Notes
    Appendix: Reconstruction of the Original Ending
    Select Bibliography

    Max Saunders
    ... read more
    Praise for Ford Madox Ford 'what Ford conveys above all is less his particular preference than his radical passion for the novel as an instrument and what can be done with it.'
    C.H. Sisson
    'It displays Ford's dedication to his art; it demonstrates, also, the possibilities of English prose in the hands of a master.'
    Peter Ackroyd, The Sunday Times
    'The Rash Act ought to be bought and read by all interested in the novel as an art form... The action takes place in the French South which Ford loved, but man no longer sustains the tradition of myth and history which that region once represented... Here in The Rash Act we have the death of morality and responsibility - a forbidding theme, but, in the paradox of art, it is made to serve a tapestry of rich colour and galloping vivacity.'
    Anthony Burgess, Observer
    'No Enemy is Ford Madox Ford's little-known First World War novel, musing and reflective, published for the first time in Britain by Carcanet and ably edited by Paul Skinner. Congratulations to them both.'
    Alan Judd, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 30th June 2002
    'Of the various demands... that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he create characters in whose reality we believe and for whose fate we care, that he describe things and people so that we feel their physical presence, that he illuminate our moral consciousness, that he make us laugh and cry, that he delight us by his craftmanship, there is not one, it seems to me, that Ford does not completely satisfy.'
    W. H. Auden
    'Of the various demands one can make of the novelist, that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he create characters whose reality we believe and for whose fate we care, that he describe things and people so that we feel their physical presence, that he illuminate our moral consciousness, that he make us laugh and cry, that he delight us by his craftsmanship, there is not one, it seems to me, that Ford does not completely satisfy. There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.'
    W.H.Auden, 1961
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