Rural Ritual, Gardened Faith: Ford Madox Ford's Memorial Plots

This article examines the importance of the working country garden to the memorial narratives of Ford Madox Ford. It begins with a study of Ford before the Great War; considering how his particular brand of Literary Impressionism was frequently used to make a case for memorializing the rural poor an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inModernist cultures Vol. 16; no. 2; p. 242
Main Author Walters, Harriet
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 01.05.2021
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Summary:This article examines the importance of the working country garden to the memorial narratives of Ford Madox Ford. It begins with a study of Ford before the Great War; considering how his particular brand of Literary Impressionism was frequently used to make a case for memorializing the rural poor and their surrounding landscape from The Heart of the Country (1906) to The Fifth Queen saga (1906–08). Moving to Post-War Sussex and Kent, it examines Ford's continuing interest in the country garden and rural community, reading his gardening practices as attempted personal reconstruction through faith in landscape production. As Ford moves from small-holding to small-holding, and eventually away for good, it discusses how the narratives of his part-fictive biographies, including Thus to Revisit (1921) and It was the Nightingale (1934), repeatedly return to rural England to resituate the developments of Literary Impressionism – and Ford's most formative literary friendships – in and about the garden. The repetitions of garden work; of sowing, weeding, and digging over plots, proved essential to Ford's in-text ritualisations of rural life and literary innovation alike.
ISSN:2041-1022
1753-8629
DOI:10.3366/mod.2021.0330