ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Ford Madox Ford’s evolving attitude towards rural spaces, through a period of dramatic changes in the English countryside, refracted through his novels, poems, memoirs and cultural criticism. Between the country and the city, between Romney Marsh and the decisive move to London, fell the shadow of Ford’s major breakdown. The major publications of Ford’s war years were the two propaganda volumes and, of course, The Good Soldier, which appeared in the spring of 1915. Demobilised in early 1919, Ford moved to West Sussex with the young Australian painter Stella Bowen and farmed in a small way, keeping pigs and chickens. From 1926 onwards, Ford spent a good deal of time in the United States, primarily in New York, though he travelled to other parts of the country for lecture engagements or research into the books he was both writing and planning.
