Casting Back: Plotting, Impressionism, and Temporality

Abstract

While Ford knew and associated with many of the best-known writers of the Edwardian age — among them Galsworthy, James, Lawrence, and Wells — by far the most important of his literary friendships was with another of his Edwardian contemporaries. Ford met Joseph Conrad in 1898 and the two writers went on to work closely together for a decade, collaborating on two novels: The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903); and one novella: The Nature of a Crime (1924), which first appeared in the English Review in 1909. However, despite the significant part that this association played in the careers of two major twentieth-century writers, the Ford-Conrad collaboration continues to occupy a curious position in literary history. Ann Barr Snitow, for example, voices the common view that Ford’s association with Conrad ‘did not lead to their writing any noteworthy books together’.¹ Indeed, critical discussions of Edwardian and modernist writing tend to view the collaboration as of incidental importance, worthy of mention in passing, perhaps, as an occasion to bracket their better-known novels together, while the co-authored works themselves fail, for the most part, to warrant serious critical attention. Nevertheless, as Snitow also observes, if the collaboration fell short of producing ‘noteworthy’ novels, it did lead to ‘months of detailed technical discussion’ between Conrad and Ford (35).