The Impressionist as Historian

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 Briggs the daughter who cannot forgive her mother's failures. It may be that Briggs is reacting against Moore's partiality; it is also true that this negative orientation is typical of biography in the 1980s. The result, at any rate, is that one needs to read both books to gain a middleground perspective. A particularly valuable aspect of A Woman of Passion—and something which E. Nesbit does not include—is its perceptive analysis of Nesbit's books for children. Briggs reveals the irony, the complexity , and the "gritty and prosaic reality" in Nesbit's view of childhood . She shows how Nesbit used fantasy less to fulfill wishes than to investigate wish-fulfillment, and the inner workings—the powers and dangers—of the imagination. She is particularly convincing in relating Nesbit's own life and longings to her children's books. In the stories of the Bastable children, for example, While her elder brothers appear as Oswald and Dicky, she presents herself as twins—the morally courageous and determined Alice and her vulnerable brother Noel, subject to fits of poetry, fainting and tears. As Alice staunchly defends her over-sensitive brother, she seems to be an image of E. Nesbit's energetic and dominating side, standing guard over a less confident but more creative self. It is tantalizing to have such insights scattered through the book rather than developed fully in any one location. But on balance, this is a fine biography—infinitely painstaking, factually trustworthy, and wonderfully readable as well. It will be indispensable for any future study of E. Nesbit. Suzanne Rahn Pacific Lutheran University THE IMPRESSIONIST AS HISTORIAN Ford Madox Ford. A History of Our Own Times. Solon Beinfeld and Sondra J. Stang, eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. $27.50 FORD BEGAN A History of Our Own Times in 1928 or 1929 and had essentially completed it by 1930, though he may have been revising the book as late as a few days before his death in 1939. He made several unsuccessful efforts to interest publishers in this work and the two subsequent volumes he had planned. Solon Beinfeld, a historian, and Sondra J. Stang, a Ford scholar, have at last brought the work into public view. As Ford's only attempt at history (besides 478 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 a very early and much less ambitious book, The Cinque Ports), it helps mitigate the view of Ford as a disdainer of facts, as well as provide a detailed and often captivating chronicle of a somewhat neglected period. The text has been meticulously prepared. Beinfeld and Stang worked primarily with the much-emended typescript at Cornell University Library, though they also examined two preliminary fragments of the work. They also perused published and unpublished letters by Ford and apparently interviewed both Janice Biala, his literary executor, and Julia Madox Loewe, his daughter, about their recollections of the project. As the editors state in a prefatory note, Ford's letters show that he unwillingly shortened the book, mostly by removing personal memories and anecdotes, to make it more marketable . The editors have restored much of the excised material, signalled in the text by curved brackets, and have also added in endnotes any portions of the other manuscripts that clarify or supplement the Cornell manuscript. The result is an uncluttered text that nevertheless preserves the notable differences among the manuscripts. Ford had hoped to write a three-volume history, with the first volume covering 1870-95, the second 1895-1914, and the third 1914 to 1930; this first installment was the only one he completed. In his two prefaces to this volume, which the editors also include, he explains that he put on the historian's mantle to provide "the fairly well educated man or woman" a chronicle, in "readable form," of "the years that preceded our own plot of time," in an effort to prevent another conflagration like the Great War and to reduce the "tabu" and "ancestor worship" that had led to dangerous and artificial barriers between countries. In his view, the last quarter of the nineteenth century had shifted the center of civilization from...