ABSTRACT
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) occupies a cardinal place in English fiction at the opening of the twentieth century, publishing over eighty works (novels, poems, memoirs, criticism) and serving as a champion and practitioner of modernist innovation. As editor of The Transatlantic Review, he discovered and promoted writers such as Ezra Pound, who said in 1914 that Ford was ‘the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance’.1 His own novels dramatized the processes of perception and narration itself, and are therefore representative of the ‘subjective’ turn in modernist fiction. Though he moved away from Victorian novelistic conventions, Ford never ceased to share his predecessors’ concerns for social history. What interested him most, however, was the complicated relationship between history and subjectivity. Indeed, it was precisely this interest that led Ford to Henry VIII and Tudor history as the subject matter for his early masterpiece, The Fifth Queen.
