ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the principal editorial decisions that have been taken in the major editions of Ford Madox Ford’s works that exist to date. It considers the effects of those decisions from a scholarly and a readerly perspective, and in the light of a planned Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford. Ford’s work is in need of systematic editorial attention to individual texts and to his entire oeuvre. The editors of Conrad’s letters of the English Review period refer to ‘the final collaboration’ between the two men as ‘uneven in every sense’, and Conrad’s contribution to this brief text does seem to have been negligible, probably no more than a few hundred words. Editors of twentieth-century texts share many of the challenges of editing early printed material. Editors mostly have to speculate whether changes introduced between surviving manuscript and printed book are authorial or were made by copy-editors.
