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

• Published in: Modernist cultures Vol. 16; no. 2; p. 242
• Main Author: Walters, Harriet
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 01.05.2021
• Subjects: Biographies; Ford, Ford Madox (1873-1939); Friendship; Gardens & gardening; Impressionism; Innovations; Memorials & monuments; Narratives; Rites & ceremonies; Rituals; Rural areas; Rural communities; Rural life; Rural poverty; Rurality
• DOI: 10.3366/mod.2021.0330
• ISSN: 2041-1022

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.