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Chapter 3 studies the formation of English modernism around the founding of Ford Madox Ford's two reviews, The English Review in 1908 and the transatlantic review in 1924, tracing the relation between Ford's consecration of Conrad as pioneering modernist and his promotion of Jean Rhys as part of a new modernist avant-garde. Framed by discussion of Rhys's citation of a passage from Conrad's Almayer's Folly in the novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the chapter examines Ford's critical emphasis on the linguistic effect of individual English words in excerpted passages of Conradian prose. Rhys's own economy of description sheds light on the celebrated Conradian search for the mot juste, revealing a problematic priority of cultural identity in the linguistic and literary formation of early twentieth-century English modernism.

This chapter addresses the debates about the future of the British novel in the years leading up the First World War. The initial focus is Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. By reading the magazine forward from the ‘Art of Fiction’ debates of the 1880s, rather than—as is usual—back through canonical modernism, we see how Ford deliberated staged comparisons between what he saw as the two distinct possibilities for the future of modern British literature: the ‘artists’ drawing on a French, specifically Flaubertian, tradition with which Ford aligned his own ‘impressionism’, and the ‘propagandists’ deriving from English and Russian nineteenth-century novels. The literary relevance of the anti-tsarist politics of the magazine is discussed, and the chapter concludes by analysing Joseph Conrad’s work of the period.

Ford Madox Ford’s founding (but short lived) editorship of The English Review from 1908-1910 inspired and provided an early publication venue for the young D. H. Lawrence, who wrote several of his early stories and sketches to please his new literary mentor as he began to move in metropolitan literary circles. This chapter identifies a consistent focus on working-class themes across contributions to The English Review and outlines Ford’s interest in the conte, or what he termed ‘the real short story’, which was in Ford’s eyes best modelled by Henry James and the nineteenth-century European tradition of Maupassant and Balzac. These were writers Lawrence also admired and Ford deemed Lawrence’s earliest regional stories to be apposite for his cultural journal which called for more working class voices, an insight into the life of the poor and greater experimentation in the short form by English writers. The chapter also considers that Lawrence’s production of several (little-known) short sketches on his experiences as a schoolteacher in Croydon were intended for Ford’s journal.

Chapter 3 focuses on the support and advice that D. H. Lawrence’s literary mentors offered him at a crucial early stage in his career. It reconsiders Lawrence’s relationship with Ford Madox Hueffer (editor of the prestigious literary monthly the English Review), examining archive evidence such as letters Hueffer sent to Lawrence advising him on his fledgling career and appraising drafts of his manuscripts. The chapter argues that Violet Hunt played a larger role in the launching of Lawrence’s career and in his approach to his first publisher William Heinemann than has previously been acknowledged. In the eyes of Hueffer and Hunt, in autumn 1909 Lawrence was a marketable proposition and an author whose works were likely to appeal to the circulating libraries. Drawing on new archival research, this chapter reveals that Lawrence’s first novel was enthusiastically reviewed in publications such as the little-known theatrical woman’s magazine Madame.