Memories of a Pre-Raphaelite Youth

” … The author’s personal, beautiful, and discursive style will appeal to enthusiasts of art and English literature.” Library Journal

One of the greatest literary artists in history, Ford Madox Ford’s childhood is brought to life in this collection of anecdotes from his many memoirs. Ford Madox Ford, best known today for Parade’s End and The Good Soldier, was also a very fine memoirist. The grandson of Ford Madox Brown, he grew up surrounded by all the great figures of Victorian artistic life, whom he saw with the unflinching eye of a child. This collection brings together some of his most evocative, witty, and tender memories of an extraordinary youth. There are rich anecdotes about the Rossettis, Brown, Morris, Burne Jones, Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Leighton, Swinburne, the accomplished con-man Charles Augustus Howell, and many of the minor but no less vivid characters that made up the bohemian life of London in the second half of the 19th century. Ford’s elegiac but always penetrating prose is a constant delight, and his comic timing invariably immaculate. Selected from Ford’s many volumes of memoirs (all now out of print), this is a superb and very funny introduction to one of the great periods of English art and poetry by a great writer at the very heart of all that was old and all that was new.