ABSTRACT
Ford Madox Ford’s literary apprenticeship can be said to have ended in the autumn of 1898 when Conrad proposed that they should join forces and work together. The collaboration began with Ford reading aloud to Joseph Conrad a draft of Seraphina, a novel of Caribbean pirates and adventure based on the life of Aaron Smith, which Ford had found in the pages of Charles Dickens’s weekly All the Year Round while doing research in the British Library for the biography of his grandfather. Conrad’s correspondence is now available in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, but there is as yet no collected edition of Ford’s letters. After the failure of the transatlantic review, Ford found far more encouragement and support from American friends than in England or among the French, and he made frequent trips to New York and beyond. Ford’s own masterpieces would not appear until later, after their collaboration had ended, along with their close friendship.
