Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala (review)

"When a man has neither wife nor mistress and leads a life which is both orderly and prudent, he does not invite the conventional biographical approach." The man, in this case, is Henry James, but Miranda Seymour did find a way to add to these remarks about him, in her book A Ring of Conspirators (1989). Her method kept James as the focus of her analysis of a group of like-minded writers, located in East Sussex in the 1890s, that included Ford Madox Ford. Now, Ford himself has been treated in this way: he is placed at the centre of a different artistic grouping in Joseph Wiesenfarth's fine new book. It is the first time Ford has been written about like this, and Wiesenfarth's title in part suggests a distant echo of H. G. Wells's jocular perception, adapted by Seymour, of a combative conspiring group of men (Ford, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, and so on) setting about the British artistic scene. The rationale for Wiesenfarth's biographical approach, however, could not be more different from Seymour's: his group is not of the same-sex variety. Ford, like James, was surrounded by artists and writers, but sometimes he tried to marry, or "marry," more than one of them at once; he had several mistresses too. One result was that he led a life that was neither orderly nor prudent. Wiesenfarth's book is sometimes as much about sex as it is about art, but thankfully the art comes out on top in the end.

The short introduction testifies to the prodigious work ethic and creative output of Ford, novelists Violet Hunt and Jean Rhys, and artists Stella Bowen and Janice Biala, and to the complex web of relationships they wove. Focusing only on these relationships, Wiesenfarth aims to give due consideration to the work of the four women (though there were also others in Ford's life) as well as of the man. At the heart of Wiesenfarth's project are the connections in that work, the ways in which the quintet's writing and painting represented, informed, encouraged, and sometimes devastated, each affiliated member.

It is a rewarding focus, and one aspect of it is what I like best about the book: watching and relishing, with the help of thirty reproductions, as Bowen's art, in particular, takes off. The image of the creative midwife is strong throughout, as the artists learn from and support one another. Hunt was older than Ford, and first published in 1894, but Bowen and Rhys were about twenty years younger, and Biala thirty. Ford gave Rhys her pen name, promoted her work, and helped her to develop her style. Bowen's writing "shows herself easily conversant with Ford's techniques of fiction" (109); his influence on her painting was less obvious, but still important—Ford had written biographies of his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown (1896), D. G. Rossetti (1902), and Hans Holbein (1905) by the time they met. Biala, more strongly still, wrote of herself to Bowen that Ford "found a little handful of dust and turned it into a human being" (156). It is an impressive tribute to the Ford who strove alongside, published, and encouraged the women he knew—the Ford Wiesenfarth alludes to in his title (which evokes a 1913 pamphlet that aligned Ford with the Votes for Women movement).

The midwifery was not all one way. On May Day 1930, in Paris, after Bowen had left him, a lonely and depressed Ford was transformed by meeting Biala. Bowen had also revitalized Ford, to the extent that he could write Parade's End, his masterpiece tetralogy about the First World War (begun in 1924). So far so good. But such positive rebirths and transformations are only half of Wiesenfarth's story. In the other half, transformations can be brutal, perhaps because they...