The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. The third and final installment of Ford's The Fifth Queen Trilogy is set during the reign of Henry VIII, a tumultuous time of political and religious oppression in a land at the mercy of a murderous King. Ford's trilogy recreates Tudor England in a masterful story of court intrigue, romance, and betrayal. Focusing on the tragic figure of Katharine Howard, the fifth wife of the King, Ford...

Privy Seal: His Last Venture (1907) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. The second installment of Ford's The Fifth Queen Trilogy is set during the reign of Henry VIII, a tumultuous time of political and religious oppression in a land at the mercy of a murderous King. Ford's trilogy recreates Tudor England in a masterful story of court intrigue, romance, and betrayal. Focusing on the tragic figure of Katharine Howard, the fifth wife of the King, Ford investigates...

Some Do Not (1924) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. Set during the First World War, the novel is the story of Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant statistician and wealthy aristocrat known as "the last Tory." As he moves from a faithless marriage into an affair of his own, eventually volunteering to fight under dubious-perhaps suicidal-motives, Tietjens appears both symbolic and tragically human, a casualty of a dying era dedicating its final breaths to...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.' Just before the First World War, two young couples meet in Germany. The seemingly perfect yet brittle relationship of the Ashburnhams soon gives way to unhappiness and betrayal, and respectability to adultery and deception. The Dowells...

This early work by Ford Madox Ford was originally published in 1907 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in his family – Hueffer's grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was a well-known painter, and his German émigré father was music critic of The Times – and after a brief dalliance with music composition, the...

Romance (1903) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad. One of just three collaborations between two of the greatest English language novelists of the twentieth century, Romance plays to the strengths of each author, to weave a tale of adventure, bad luck, and political intrigue. Adapted into The Road to Romance (1927), a lost silent film, Romance remains a highly entertaining and largely forgotten work of English fiction. "What are these...

Once upon a time there was a King who reigned over a country as yet, for a reason you may learn later on, undiscovered-a most lovely country, full of green dales and groves of oak, a land of dappled meadows and sweet rivers, a green cup in a circlet of mountains, in whose shadow the grass was greenest; and the only road to enter the country lay up steep, boiling waterfalls, and thereafter through rugged passes, the channels that the rivers had cut...

Following WWI, an English aristocrat struggles to find peace as he attempts to rebuild his life in this conclusion to the Parade's End Tetralogy.   The Great War is over. The ancestral home of Christopher Tietjens has been sold to an American. Christopher and Valentine Wannop now share a cottage with his brother and sister-in-law. A mathematician before the war, Christopher now earns a living selling antique furniture. It seems his world will...

Excerpt: "It was once said of Mr. Robert Grimshaw: "That chap is like a seal"-and the simile was a singularly just one. He was like a seal who is thrusting his head and shoulders out of the water, and, with large, dark eyes and sensitive nostrils, is on the watch. All that could be known of him seemed to be known; all that could be known of the rest of the world he moved in he seemed to know. He carried about with him usually, in a crook of his arm,...

Once upon a time, a Queen sat in her garden. She was quite a young, young Queen; but that was a long while ago, so she would be older now. But, for all she was Queen over a great and powerful country, she led a very quiet life, and sat a great deal alone in her garden watching the roses grow, and talking to a bat that hung, head downwards, with its wings folded, for all the world like an umbrella, beneath the shade of a rose tree overhanging her favourite...