The Fifth Queen Crowned - Couverture souple

Ford, Ford Madox

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1447461266 ISBN 13 : 9781447461265

Editeur : Read Books, 2012

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Ford Madox Ford's "The Fifth Queen" - actually a collection of three separate novels - is a fictionalized account of the fifth wife of England's Henry VIII, Katharine Howard. As A.S. Byatt explains in her Introduction, "This figure bears little relation to what we have about the real Katharine . . ." and thus the reader should be conscious that Ford's Katharine - a young, pretty, pious woman who yearns for a return to Catholicism after Henry's split with Rome - is strictly fictional. That said, the only real failure of this work is that Katharine is the least appealing, least interesting character; we first meet her as a dispossessed ingenue seeking entrance to Henry's court around the time of his disasterous fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves, and it is this description which will follow her throughout the book. Even as she becomes Queen, it is almost by accident, surviving the machinations of Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal and the recklessness of her devoted cousin Culpepper. She is Queen by default. She constantly protests that all she seeks is a Catholic England - the "old ways" - and yet throughout she resigns herself to letting events happen to her, as if she cannot control the consequences of her own life. Indeed, her final speech to Henry where she confesses to an adultery which did not occur, becomes her last fatal act of passivity, for which she pays with her life. She cannot see that there are those who wish to help her and that her naive, narcissistic piety does not have to be her ruin. What holds these novels together is the rich supporting cast: the aforementioned Cromwell, who has his own sovereign Protestant image of England, free from the entanglements of Rome. There is the brooding Princess Mary, Henry's daughter by his first wife, who knows how to carry a grudge for her mother's divorce, the super-spy Throckmorton, the lecherous Magister Udal and more. Ford uses Katharine to show that the blind commitment to an ideal - any ideal - will only result in failure, that this world is more than ideas and faiths, but of people who are imperfect, people who will fail. It is a world five hundred years in the past, but it is also our own.

Biographie de l'auteur :

About the Author - London-born Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) is remembered for his novel 'The Good Soldier' and 'The Fifth Queen' trilogy among many other fine books. He was a poet and journal editor who helped develop literature in the early in 20th-century. Ford was born in Wimbledon to Catherine Madox Brown and Francis Hueffer, a music critic for The Times newspaper. He initially wrote under the name Ford Madox Hueffer in honour of his grandfather, painter Ford Madox Brown. He was a contemporary of authors Henry James and H.G. Wells and spent several years teaching at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan. He died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65. 'The Good Soldier' (1915) is set just before World War I. In real life, the author was involved in British war propaganda and worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, along with Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books and enlisted in the Welch Regiment of the British Army in 1915. Ford wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism. He and Joseph Conrad worked on three novels: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924. His best known work was 'The Fifth Queen' trilogy (1906–1908), which Conrad termed "the swan song of historical romance."

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Read Books
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1447461266
• ISBN 13: 9781447461265
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 242